Death due to heat: In the past decade, 90 people have died in Prague every year, twice as many as before
At the average station, the researchers compared the daily temperature measured in Prague-Ruzyně between May and September in individual decades, specifically from 1982 to 2019, and their effect on mortality in Prague.
“The frequency and intensity of heat waves over the past decade has been unprecedented,” said the head of the research team Aleš Urban from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Academy of Sciences. “While the average summer temperature in the 1980s was 15.3 degrees Celsius, between 2010 and 2019 it was 16.9 degrees Celsius and there was also a significant increase in days with an average daily higher than 20 degrees Celsius“The scientist described.
The impact of the hot weather on the death then manifested itself significantly. While in the first 28 years, the team recorded an average 50 deaths per year associated with heat, in the last decade studied it has been 90 such deaths per year. “In relative numbers, this represents an increase in the death rate of one percent to almost two percent of all deaths in the reporting period“Added Urban. The record number of heat-related deaths was recorded in 2015, at 250, or more than five percent of all deaths between May and September.
Urban drew attention to the need to adapt cities to warmer periods due to climate change. “An early warning system for the population should be set up for periods of extremely high temperatures, which coordinates the individual components of the integrated rescue system, similar to the occurrence of floods, “said the scientist. “In countries in southern and western Europe, where similar systems were launched after the hot summer of 2003, we see that it really works,” Urban concluded.
Researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Academy of Sciences cooperated with researchers from the Faculty of the Environment of the CULS.
Weather in the Czech Republic in May 2022
Author: Blesk: ROBERT KLEJCH / CNC Robert Klejch