Geographical and Sex Heterogeneity in Temperature Related Deaths in Europe

Rosanna Gualdi , Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
Risto Conte Keivabu, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)

Europe is considered as one of the contexts where extreme temperature is determining one the highest number of excess deaths and climate change is expected to exacerbate this public health threat in the future. Importantly, European countries widely differ in their exposure and preparedness to extreme cold and heat events. In this study, we explore how extreme temperatures affect elderly mortality in Europe considering geographical and sex heterogeneities in the effect of extreme cold and heat. For this purpose, we leverage Eurostat register data on monthly deaths at the NUTS3 level on 28 countries from 2014 to 2022, and we combined it with precise meteorological observations provided by E-OBS. We use a Poisson fixed effects approach widely used in literature to estimate the effect of temperature on mortality. Our findings show cold and heat exposure to increase elderly mortality in the pooled sample of European countries. Furthermore, the effect of hot temperatures is larger women than for men, but we do not observe major differences for cold temperatures. In conclusion, extreme heat and cold pose a public health challenge for Europe, but substantive differences exist between European regions in the vulnerability to these health risks.

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 Presented in Session P2. Health, Mortality, Ageing - Aperitivo