Estimating heat wave-related mortality in Europe using singular spectrum analysis

Steffen Merte ()
Additional contact information
Steffen Merte: Columbia University

Climatic Change, 2017, vol. 142, issue 3, No 2, 330 pages

Abstract: Abstract Estimating the impact of heat waves on human mortality is key when it comes to the design of effective climate change adaptation measures. As the usual approach—relying on detailed health data in form of hospital records—is not feasible for many countries, a different methodology is needed. This work presents such an approach. Based on singular spectrum analysis and using monthly mortality rates—partly ranging back to 1960—it derives excess mortality estimates for 27 European countries. Excess mortality is then regressed against a heat wave measure in order to assess the health impacts of extreme heat. The analysis demonstrates that many European countries are severely affected by heat waves: On average, 0.61%—and up to 1.14% in case of Portugal—of all deaths are caused by extreme heat events. This finding confirms the understanding that climate change is a major environmental risk to public health: In the 27 examined European countries, over 28,000 people die every year due to exposure to extreme heat.

Keywords: Heat Wave; Excess Mortality; Extreme Heat; Singular Spectrum Analysis; Human Mortality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-017-1937-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:142:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s10584-017-1937-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-017-1937-9

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().