Bucharest Among European Cities Facing High Climate-Related Death Rise
Bucharest will be among the European cities with the highest increase in the death rate caused by global warming, shows a pan-European study, published in Nature. By the end of the century, the Romanian capital will record 55 more deaths per hundred thousand inhabitants due to heat waves. Higher rates, only in Italy, Spain and Greece.
A team of researchers from public institutes in Europe (UK, Spain, Italy, Norway, Greece, Switzerland, European Commission) has modeled the effects that global warming will have on the continent’s densely populated cities.
The paper highlights the increased risk of heat-related deaths under climate scenarios that assume average global temperature increases of 2-3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, but cities will experience much higher temperatures during heat waves than rural areas.
Already, in summer, the differences between large cities and the surrounding rural areas are up to +15 degrees Celsius. Cities are described as “heat islands” due to factors such as concrete infrastructure that absorbs and retains heat, but also due to insufficient vegetation.
In the most extreme scenario, global warming will lead to 2.3 million additional deaths annually from heat waves across the continent. Athens, Madrid and Rome will be the most affected metropolises, but Bucharest is also at the top, with a rate of +55 deaths per year per hundred thousand inhabitants, which, with the current population of two million inhabitants, would mean over a thousand deaths per year caused by the heat wave alone and only in Bucharest.
At the country 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 thousand people per year. But, 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 Genoa.
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