HIBAPRESS-RABAT
In the summer of 2023 alone, sweltering heat killed an estimated 61,672 people in Europe, and imagine what the situation will be in 2024. Most of those who died already had health problems such as heart and lung disease. But their deaths were not inevitable: their breathing stopped and their hearts failed in scorching temperatures, the risk of which has increased 160-fold this year due to climate change.
It is possible to count climate deaths in this way thanks to attribution science, which measures the responsibility of climate change for a particular extreme weather event.
It is much harder to estimate the cumulative number of deaths from climate change, but one expert estimates that it is on track to exceed 4 million since 2000, a total larger than the population of Berlin.
Very few of these deaths will have been acknowledged by the victims’ families or by national governments.
“Very few of these deaths will have been recognized by the victims’ families or by national governments as being the result of climate change,” writes Colin Carlson, an American climate epidemiologist, in a commentary published in the journal Nature Medicine.
Colin Carlson, a global change biologist and assistant professor at Georgetown University, calls for a radical shift in how we think about and respond to the climate emergency.
