Carbon-heavy heat caused 50,000 deaths in Europe last year

Hot weather fuelled by carbon pollution killed nearly 50,000 people in Europe last year, with the continent warming at a much faster pace than other parts of the world, a study has found.

The revelations come after wildfires raged in forests outside Athens, as France issued excessive heat warnings for large areas of the country and the UK faced what the Metological Office expects to be its hottest day of the year.

Doctors call heat a "silent killer" because it takes far more lives than most people think. The devastating mortality rate in 2023 would be 80% higher if people had not adapted to rising temperatures over the past two decades, according to the study published in Nature Medicine.

Elisa Gallo, an environmental epidemiologist at ISGlobal and lead author of the study, said the results showed that efforts undertaken to adapt societies to heat waves had been effective.