Climate, WHO: “In Europe at least 15 thousand died from the heat”. Al Gore’s alarm: “The Po is drying up”
The climate emergency is already causing deaths, but immediate action could save more lives in the future. This is the message launched today by the World Health Organization, on the day the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, known as COP27, kicked off in Egypt.
According to the WHO, at least 15,000 people have died in Europe from the exceptional heat wave that swept the Old Continent last summer.
According to an estimate still considered low, around 4,500 people lost their lives in Germany for reasons specifically related to the heat this year, almost 4,000 in Spain, over 3,200 in the UK and more than 1,000 in Portugal. France instead recorded 11,000 excess deaths in the period between 1 June and 22 August compared to the same period in 2019, before the covid-19 pandemic. According to the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee), these data “are probably explained by the heat wave that occurred in mid-July, after an initial heat wave already in mid-June”.
Even if not all European countries have yet communicated the data relating to extra deaths, the provisional figure of 15 thousand victims is already worrying: in the previous 50 years, 148 thousand total victims were caused by the heat. The European continent, underlines the WHO, is the region that warmed the most in the 60 years between 1961 and 2021, with an average increase of 0.5 degrees per decade.
“We need more action in our European region and beyond,” said European Region Director Hans Kluge, who called for greater efforts to adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change. “We must do it now if we want to prevent the climate crisis from turning into an irreversible climate disaster for our region and the entire planet.”
The extreme drought of last summer was also mentioned by Al Gore, one of the pioneers in the fight against climate change, who spoke today at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh. “The Nile Delta is salinizing,” said Gore, who also cited the salinization of the Mekong Delta: “we are causing it.” “Drought is drying up the mighty Mississippi in my country, the Tigris and Euphrates in the cradle of civilization, the Po River in Italy, the Loire in France, the Rhine in Germany,” said the former vice president of the United States. , defeated by George W. Bush in the contested 2000 vote. “Worldwide, the largest water reserves are reaching what is called a ‘dead pool’ status,” Gore added, referring to the threshold below which water from a reservoir is no longer able to flow downstream.
“Experts predict a billion climate migrants who will cross international borders this century,” stressed the democratic politician, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. “We are all here today because we continue to use the thin blue shell of atmosphere that surrounds our planet like an open sewer ”, he highlighted. “This is why we are witnessing these disasters”.
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