Around 450,000 people worldwide could die by February as a result of hotter weather caused by the record-breaking El Niño, climate scientists are warning. The estimate is based on how many deaths have resulted from past temperature extremes around the world. This could include assigning health workers to check on the most vulnerable, ensuring people have enough water and providing fans or air conditioning.
Extreme heat is now making cities unlivable. Most of the deaths in the next six months will be in the southern hemisphere, because the extra heat will coincide with spring and summer there. But El Niño is expected to persist into the northern hemisphere’s spring, so there will be another wave of deaths there after February.
The projection of 450,000 deaths, published in a report by the Climate Impact Lab at the University of Chicago, is based on the observed relationship between temperature and excess deaths. This is a U-shaped curve, with more deaths occurring in extreme cold or heat, but its precise shape varies from place to place depending on whether the people and infrastructure are adapted to heat extremes, say, or can afford things such as air conditioning. A 2022 study divided the world into 24,000 regions and estimated this relationship for each one, based either on historical data going back decades or on extrapolating from similar regions.
Grover-Kopec and her colleagues have now combined this approach with the seasonal forecast from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to estimate how many more people than usual could die as a result of heat caused by El Niño. The results suggest that over the period of the six-month forecast, from September until February, there will be 240,000 additional heat-related deaths. Adding the deaths estimated to have already occurred since the current El Niño started in June takes the total to 450,000.
Africa will be hit hardest, the team estimates, with over 30,000 extra deaths in Nigeria alone in the next six months. There could be 19,000 extra deaths in Indonesia, 16,000 in India and 13,000 in Brazil over the same period. The report divides people into three age groups: 4 or under, 65 or above, and the rest.
So far, 35,000 extra deaths in Europe attributable to the heat have been reported over a longer period of the summer. The projection of 240,000 additional deaths between September and February depends on the forecast being right, says Callahan. The ECMWF forecast sits right in the middle of other forecasts, says Grover-Kopec, so it represents a moderate view of what could happen.
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