Europe suffered record number of 'extreme heat stress' days in 2023

Continent warming twice as fast as global average, says report by 2 climate monitors

Europe endured a record number of "extreme heat stress" days in 2023, two leading climate monitors said on April 22, underscoring the threat of increasingly deadly summers across the continent.

In a year of contrasting extremes, Europe witnessed scorching heatwaves but also catastrophic flooding, withering droughts, violent storms and its largest wildfire.

These disasters inflicted billions of dollars in damage and impacted more than two million people, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service and the UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said in a new joint report.

The consequences for health were particularly acute, with heat singled out by the agencies as the biggest climate-related threat as global warming drives ever-hotter European summers.

"We're seeing an increasing trend in the number of days with heat stress across Europe and 2023 was no exception, with Europe seeing a record number of days with extreme heat stress," said Dr Rebecca Emerton, a climate scientist at Copernicus.

For the study, Copernicus and WMO used the Universal Thermal Climate Index, which measures the effect of the environment on the human body.