‘Europe braces for sweltering July‘ headlines European space agency ESA. At the time of writing, our continent is sighing under the heat wave ‘Charon’ (named after a necromancer from Greek mythology). Vacationers were evacuated on Greek islands because of forest fires, ground temperatures in Spain soared above 60 degrees Celsius, and ESA predicts that Italian islands Sardinia and Sicily will hit 49 degrees this summer. Warmer than that has never been recorded in Europe (the record now stands at 48.8 degrees Celsius). We are breaking record after record for the second summer in a row – and we are only halfway through July.
Record number of heat-related deaths
The above facts are shocking, but we can hardly call them a surprise. The UN climate panel IPCC predicted two years ago that countries around the Mediterranean are warming faster than the global average. Temperatures above 50 degrees will be “no exception in the next century, according to the IPCC report.”
Exposure to high temperatures also affects our health. The effects of heat on our physical constitution are cumulative – the body does not recover until the temperature drops below 27 degrees Celsius. Research by a French and a Spanish research institute published in Nature, found that last year’s heat wave claimed the lives of 61,000 Europeans. Based on Eurostat statistics, the researchers saw unusually high death rates between late May and early September. By comparison, in 2003, there were seventy thousand heat-related deaths.
Something is going wrong. That the earth keeps warming up, for a start, but besides that, EU member states’ heat plans are insufficient, while the need for them is growing.
Europe battling heat
You can find lists of these disturbing facts on all news media. You are reading them here now because Innovation Origins is investigating one central question this summer. How do (or should) cities in Europe arm themselves against heat?
Over the next few weeks, you can expect an article every Wednesday in which we solve a piece of that question. Stories about cities that have their heat plans in order and which do not. About innovations already in full use and those still on the shelf. About the role of digital twins in combating a heat wave and the lessons we can learn from an experimental garden in Groningen.
Is there a topic missing from the above list that you would like to know more about? Then be sure to let us know ([email protected]). To ‘warm up’ a bit already, take a look at our series of last year, in which Jelmer Visser analyzed the effects of the hot summer on the warming of Dutch cities.
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