The devastating heat wave in 2003 was a wake-up call for Europeans

Transcript

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

Many places in Europe are boiling this week. In Spain and Italy, temperatures are well into the hundreds. A new study found that similar heat last summer contributed to more than 47,000 deaths, but as NPR's Alejandra Borunda from the Climate Desk explains, there's some good news, too.

ALEJANDRA BORUNDA, BYLINE: Scientist Elisa Gallo has lived through plenty of hot summers in Italy, where she grew up, and Spain, where she lives now, but in the past few years, something has felt different. It's been so hot that...

ELISA GALLO: It was really, you know, hard to do everything. Also, if we had to go out to buy something, it was really difficult.

BORUNDA: Gallo knows heat isn't just uncomfortable. It contributes to thousands of premature deaths. She and her colleagues from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health just published a study in the journal Nature Medicine that figured out the human toll of last summer's extreme European heat.

GALLO: We estimated that in 2023, we had more than 47,000 deaths attributable to heat.

BORUNDA: That's an enormous number, but Gallo says that number actually could have been 80% higher if Europeans hadn't already made adaptations to handle heat made worse by climate change. The adaptation started after a devastating heat wave in 2003, where some 70,000 people died. It was a wake-up call.

GALLO: And from that moment on, people started to be aware of that and started to work on that. They realized climate change was real.

BORUNDA: And they started adapting. France developed heat warning systems. Madrid expanded green spaces to cool the whole city, and smaller cities are doing it, too. Jordi Mazon is a climate researcher at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona. He also runs the climate adaptation program for the small nearby city of Viladecans, where he says climate change has made summer more hot and humid - almost like Florida.

JORDI MAZON: In summer times, from June to September, there is a very heavy summer.

BORUNDA: Viladecans recognized the health risks that heat posed, so it's adapting to help keep the city cooler.

MAZON: The main thing that we are doing now is greening the city.

BORUNDA: That means they're planting trees and ripping up concrete, to drop urban temperatures.

MAZON: I'm sure that we are improving the comfortability of the city, and then we will reduce the risk of death.

BORUNDA: Ladd Keith is a climate and urban planning expert at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He says studies like Gallo's demonstrate the importance of adaptation.

LADD KEITH: They show that we've already lived historically with heat, and we've already had some level of adaptation that's prevented some loss of life.

BORUNDA: Keith says the next step is to figure out exactly which interventions are most effective. In some places, it might be urban greening - in others, opening cooling centers. But Keith says the most important thing is cutting climate-warming pollution. Alejandra Borunda, NPR News.

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