Projections of temperature-attributable mortality in Europe: a time series analysis of 147 contiguous regions in 16 countries

• Published in: The Lancet Planetary Health
• Main Authors: Martínez-Solanas, Èrica, Quijal-Zamorano, Marcos, Achebak, Hicham, Petrova, Desislava, Robine, Jean-Marie, Herrmann, François, Rodó, Xavier, Ballester, Joan
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: info:eu-repo/classification/ddc/618.97; Arctic
• Online Access: https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:157264

Background: Europe has emerged as a major climate change hotspot, both in terms of an increase in seasonal averages and climate extremes. Projections of temperature-attributable mortality, however, have not been comprehensively reported for an extensive part of the continent. Therefore, we aim to estimate the future effect of climate change on temperature-attributable mortality across Europe. Methods: We did a time series analysis study. We derived temperature-mortality associations by collecting daily temperature and all-cause mortality records of both urban and rural areas for the observational period between 1998 and 2012 from 147 regions in 16 European countries. We estimated the location-specific temperature-mortality relationships by using standard time series quasi-Poisson regression in conjunction with a distributed lag non-linear model. These associations were used to transform the daily temperature simulations from the climate models in the historical period (1971-2005) and scenario period (2006-2099) into projections of temperature-attributable mortality. We combined the resulting risk functions with daily time series of future temperatures simulated by four climate models (ie, GFDL-ESM2M, HadGEM2-ES, IPSL-CM5A-LR, and MIROC5) under three greenhouse gas emission scenarios (ie, Representative Concentration Pathway [RCP]2.6, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5), providing projections of future mortality attributable fraction due to moderate and extreme cold and heat temperatures.