Bucharest is among the European cities with heat-related deaths, a figure that is expected to rise, a pan-European study, published in Nature shows.
By the end of the century, the Romanian capital will record 55 more deaths per hundred thousand inhabitants due to heat waves. Higher rates will only be recorded in the Mediterranean countries of Italy, Spain and Greece.
A team of researchers from public institutes in UK, Spain, Italy, Norway, Greece, Switzerland and the European Commission has measured the effects that global warming will have on the continent’s densely populated cities.
The paper looks at heat-related deaths under the scenario of a 2-3 degrees Celsius increase by the end of the century. Cities will experience much higher temperatures during heat waves than rural areas.
Already, the differences between large cities and the surrounding rural areas can be up to +15 degrees Celsius in the summer.
Cities are described as “heat islands” due to factors such as concrete infrastructure that absorbs and retains heat, and also due to sparse vegetation.
In the most extreme scenario, global warming will lead to 2.3 million additional deaths annually from heat waves across Europe.
Athens, Madrid and Rome will be the most affected cities, but Bucharest isn’t far behind with a rate of +55 deaths per year per hundred thousand inhabitants. With a current population of two million inhabitants, this would mean over a thousand deaths per year caused by the heat wave alone and only in Bucharest.
At the national level, climate change would produce a net increase (the number of deaths caused by cold weather in winter is reduced) in the number of deaths by 81 per hundred thousand inhabitants, or approximately 16,000 people per year.
The study also shows, these deaths could be reduced by at least two thirds if preventive measures were taken. The most affected large cities will be, in order, Barcelona, Rome, Naples, Madrid, Milan, Athens, Valencia, Marseille, Bucharest and Genova.
The study looked at heat-related and cold-related mortality in 854 European urban areas, under several climate, demographic and adaptation scenarios. We showed that, with no adaptation to heat, the increase in heat-related deaths consistently exceeds any decrease in cold-related deaths across all considered scenarios in Europe.
