Barcelona, the second European city with the most heat-related deaths

BarcelonaBarcelona is the second European city that had the most additional deaths due to heat caused by climate change during the summer. Specifically, 1,587 deaths can be attributed to global warming out of a total of 1,842 deaths due to high temperatures. This is stated in a study published in the journal Nature Health within the framework of an investigation conducted by Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

According to the research, climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels was behind 86% of the deaths from extreme heat recorded between June and August in the capital. The investigation is based on data from 854 European cities, and Barcelona is only surpassed by Milan, which recorded 1,627 deaths attributable to the planet's warming.

Furthermore, there are 11 Catalan towns that also appear in the analysis. Regarding the provincial capitals, the figure attributable to global warming in Tarragona is 34 out of a total of 47 people who died from the heat (73%), in Lleida, 35 out of a total of 52 (68%), and in Girona, 26 out of a total of 36 (73%).

32,600 deaths in Europe

At a European scale, the mortality attributable to high temperatures reached 50,000 people (analyzing 854 cities in 30 different countries, a population of about 173 million). The report concludes that, without human activity and, therefore, without global warming, some 32,600 deaths would have been avoided in Europe during the summer. According to the report, therefore, climate change is responsible for 65% of heat-related deaths on the continent.

In the set of 90 Spanish cities examined, scientists estimate that climate change caused 5,227 of the 6,824 heat-related deaths recorded in that season, 77% of the total. This makes the summer of 2026 the deadliest since 2000, ahead of the peaks recorded in the years 2022 and 2023.

To calculate this data, scientists compared the temperatures recorded during the summer with those that would have occurred in a hypothetical scenario without human-caused warming. Subsequently, they applied statistical models based on the relationship between temperatures and mortality observed in previous epidemiological studies. The results are statistical estimates and not a count of individual deaths certified as a consequence of the heat. The authors point out that the methodology allows for approximating the health impact of extreme temperatures before definitive mortality data is available, although they also acknowledge that the calculations are subject to a margin of uncertainty.

"It is one more reminder of the urgent need to implement specific interventions to protect those who are most vulnerable to increasingly extreme temperatures, such as rapidly abandoning fossil fuels," warns Clair Barnes, a researcher on the study from Imperial College. According to the scientists' calculations, at the beginning of this century, approximately 40% of heat-related deaths were attributed to human-caused warming, while this summer the proportion reached 65%.

The study also identifies an especially critical period between June 17 and July 1, during which nearly a third of the estimated deaths were concentrated. During those weeks, the average daily temperatures for the entire region exceeded the usual values for the reference period between 1991 and 2020 by more than five degrees.