Improvements in life expectancy mask rising trends in heat-related excess mortality attributable to climate change

Huber, Veronika ; Breitner-Busch, Susanne ; Feldbusch, Hanna; Frieler, Katja ; He, Cheng ; Matthies-Wiesler, Franziska ; Mengel, Matthias ; Zhang, Siqi; Peters, Annette und Schneider, Alexandra (2025): Improvements in life expectancy mask rising trends in heat-related excess mortality attributable to climate change. In: Nature Communications, Bd. 16, 11632

Abstract

Previous attribution studies of heat-related excess mortality have given limited attention to temporal trends in vulnerability and their non-climatic drivers. Here, we address this gap by combining counterfactual temperature data derived from multidecadal reanalysis series with time-varying warm-season temperature-mortality associations for the 15 most populous cities in Germany over 1993-2022. We find that declining vulnerability, associated with improvements in life expectancy, has led to decreasing trends in heat-related excess mortality in most cities despite summer warming. In contrast, if life expectancies had not improved, climate change would have induced increasing trends in the heat-related death burden. The growing anthropogenic fingerprint also emerges in the relative proportion of heat-related excess mortality attributable to climate change, which increased by 5.6% per decade (95% confidence interval: 2.6%, 8.6%), averaging 53.6 % (49.8%, 58.9%) across the study period. Our results underline the importance of accounting for evolving vulnerability when attributing human health outcomes to climate change.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• EU Funded Grant Agreement Number: 101032087
• Fakultät: Medizin > Institut für Medizinische Informationsverarbeitung, Biometrie und Epidemiologie
• Themengebiete: 600 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften > 610 Medizin und Gesundheit
• ISSN: 2041-1723
• Sprache: Englisch