The footprint of human-induced climate change on heat-related deaths in the summer of 2022 in Switzerland

Abstract

Human-induced climate change is leading to an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, which are severely affecting the health of the population. The exceptional heat during the summer of 2022 in Europe is an example, with record-breaking temperatures only below the infamous 2003 summer. High ambient temperatures are associated with many health outcomes, including premature mortality. However, there is limited quantitative evidence on the contribution of anthropogenic activities to the substantial heat-related mortality observed in recent times. Here we combined methods in climate epidemiology and attribution to quantify the heat-related mortality burden attributed to human-induced climate change in Switzerland during the summer of 2022. We first estimated heat-mortality association in each canton and age/sex population between 1990 and 2017 in a two-stage time-series analysis. We then calculated the mortality attributed to heat in the summer of 2022 using observed mortality, and compared it with the hypothetical heat-related burden that would have occurred in absence of human-induced climate change. This counterfactual scenario was derived by regressing the Swiss average temperature against global mean temperature in both observations and CMIP6 models. We estimate 623 deaths [95% empirical confidence interval (95% eCI): 151–1068] due to heat between June and August 2022, corresponding to 3.5% of all-cause mortality. More importantly, we find that 60% of this burden (370 deaths [95% eCI: 133–644]) could have been avoided in absence of human-induced climate change. Older women were affected the most, as well as populations in western and southern Switzerland and more urbanized areas. Our findings demonstrate that human-induced climate change was a relevant driver of the exceptional excess health burden observed in the 2022 summer in Switzerland.

Designing and describing climate change impact attribution studies: a guide to common approaches

“…The same distinction can be made for event impact attribution, based on whether studies are concerned with the probability of observing an event with comparable impacts (e.g., a "heat mortality event similar to the 2003 European heat wave"), or the magnitude of the impact resulting from a specific event (e.g., "excess deaths caused by the 2003 European heat wave due to the contributions of anthropogenic forcings"). The latter category obviously captures storyline event attribution studies that include an impact-related component, but also includes other impact studies with a similar philosophy but less explicit adherence to the storyline approach (Vicedo-Cabrera et al, 2023).…”

“…Some studies may also take a storyline-approach without explicitly using storylines to simulate the event of interest. For example, one recent study simulated mortality in Switzerland during the unusually warm summer of 2022; impact analyses based on different records of temperature observations were compared to counterfactual temperature scenarios, constructed by subtracting the estimated human contribution to long-term warming trends (Vicedo-Cabrera et al, 2023).…”