India leads the world in deaths caused by heatwaves each year, with 1.53 lakh deaths worldwide: study

A recent study that looked at data collected over the 30 years after 1990 found that heatwaves were responsible for around 1.53 lakh fatalities globally per year. India had the largest proportion of these fatalities, accounting for more than a fifth of them. After India, China and Russia accounted for around 14% and 8% of these additional fatalities linked to heatwaves, respectively.

According to research performed by Monash University in Australia, extra fatalities linked to heatwaves accounted for around one-third of all heat-related deaths and 1% of all deaths worldwide. Almost half of the 1.53 lakh additional fatalities that occur every summer come from Asia, while more than thirty percent come from Europe. Notably, the greatest projected mortality rates (deaths per population) were seen in areas with lower-middle incomes and drier climates. PLoS Medicine has reported these results.

“During the warm seasons from 1990 to 2019, heatwave-related excess deaths accounted for 153,078 deaths per year, a total of 236 deaths per ten million residents or 1 percent of global deaths,” the researchers said. The Multi-Country Multi-City (MCC) Collaborative Research Network, situated in the United Kingdom, provided the researchers with daily mortality and temperature data from 750 sites spread over 43 nations.

When the decade before 2019 was compared to the decade before 1999, it was found that the average number of days that heatwaves occur each year increased from 13.4 to 13.7 globally and that the average global temperature warmed by 0.35 degrees Celsius every ten years. The researchers noted that while past studies have evaluated the additional mortality caused by heatwaves on a local level, until now there hasn’t been a comparison of these estimates across a long time span internationally.