Europe’s aging population and overstretched healthcare systems leave the continent dangerously unprepared for increasingly severe heat waves. Senior citizens, who are most vulnerable to extreme heat, now number approximately 40% more than two decades ago. While local authorities have implemented heat action plans and cooling centers, emergency and public health services remain unable to handle surges in hospital admissions. Longer-term adaptive measures — including artificial shading, expanded green spaces, and updated building codes — are being explored but have yet to provide adequate protection.
In-Depth:
Instead, many countries are viewing at other adaptive measures—artificial shading, more green spaces, and updating building codes to ensure that newer buildings are better designed to handle heat.
More immediately, local authorities are taking precautions like heat action plans, createshift cooling centers, and communicating the dangers of heat waves well in advance, but they have been unable to adequately respond to health emergencies that result from heat waves, Misattempt declares. “Local authorities, despite their best efforts, have not been able to prepare the public health services and emergency services in advance to account for an expected spike in, for instance, hospital-related admissions related to heat,” he adds. That’s, in part, becaapply the E.U.’s population is aging: the number of senior citizens, who are more vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat, has risen by approximately 40% over the past two decades. What’s more, many of Europe’s health care systems are already stretched thin—even without an extreme weather event to contconclude with.
