Four billion people, about half the world's population, will experience at least one extra month of extreme heat caused by human-induced climate change from May 2024 to May 2025, researchers report.
Analysis by World Weather Attribution, Climate Central and the Red Cross shows that extreme heat has caused illness, death, crop losses and put pressure on energy and health systems.
“While floods and cyclones often make headlines, heat waves are perhaps the deadliest extreme event,” the report said.
Many heat-related deaths go unreported or are misdiagnosed as other conditions, such as heart disease or kidney failure.
Scientists used peer-reviewed methods to analyse how climate change contributed to the rise in temperatures during the heat wave and assessed the likelihood of it occurring as a result of climate change.
In almost every country in the world, the number of days with extreme heat has at least doubled compared to the situation without climate change.
The Caribbean islands were among the hardest hit by additional days of extreme heat, according to the report.
Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, experienced 161 days of extreme heat, compared to just 48 days without climate change.
“It makes it seem impossible to be outside,” said Charlotte Gossett Navarro, senior director for Puerto Rico at the Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit that focuses on social and environmental issues in Latino communities, and a San Juan resident who was not involved in the report.
“Even something as simple as spending a day outdoors with family has become impossible due to the extreme heat.”
Gossett Navarro noted that when power outages occur, which are common in Puerto Rico due to years of grid neglect and damage caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017, it can be difficult to sleep.
“If you're relatively healthy, it's just uncomfortable, you have trouble sleeping… but if you have health problems, your life is at risk,” she added.
Friederike Otto, associate professor of climate science at Imperial College London and one of the report's authors, said heatwaves were silent killers.
“People don't die on the street from the heat… they die either in hospitals or in poorly insulated houses, and so they simply don't get noticed,” she explained.
Those most vulnerable to extreme heat include low-income and vulnerable groups such as the elderly and people with chronic diseases.
The high temperatures recorded during extreme heat events seen in Central Asia in March, South Sudan in February and the Mediterranean in July last year would not have been possible without climate change, the report said.
At least 21 people have died in Morocco after temperatures reached 48C in July last year.
The report says strategies to prepare for heat waves include extreme temperature monitoring and warning systems, providing emergency medical care, creating cooling shelters, updating building codes, enforcing high-temperature safety regulations in the workplace and designing cities to be more heat-resilient.
However, without a gradual phase-out of fossil fuels, heat waves will become more intense and frequent, and heat protection measures will become less effective, scientists say.
Sourse: breakingnews.ie
