ATHENS – Even with air conditioning – not widely available in the past, such as in July, 1987 when more than 1300 people died in a heatwave in Greece – searing temperatures have continued to kill, Greece and Bulgaria having the most in Europe in 2023.
There were more than 47,000 excess heat-related deaths then, climate change largely ignored by world governments said to be a major contributing factor, and a study in Nature Medicine said it “is having an increasing impact on the lives and healths of billions of people around the world,” said Forbes magazine.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anuradhavaranasi/2024/08/26/in-europe-greece-and-bulgaria-had-the-highest-heat-related-deaths-in-2023/

The study pointed to Greece and Bulgaria being the hardest hit along with noting that 2023 was the hottest year ever, with more than half the days having temperatures exceeding the global average surface warning of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures.
In 2016, the Paris Agreement that was mostly a window dressing attempt to deal with climate change set unenforceable guidelines that said passing the 1.5 degree threshold would risk increased heat waves, droughts, flood and hurricanes, and did.

To calculate the number of heat-related deaths across Europe, researchers used temperature and mortality records of 543 million Europeans who were residing in 823 regions from 35 countries. They found that four major extreme heat events triggered episodes of high mortality during the summer of 2023.

“The highest overall heat-related mortality rates were found in Southern Europe, especially in Greece (393 deaths per million), Bulgaria (229 deaths per million), Italy (209 deaths per million), Spain (175 deaths per million), Cyprus (167 deaths per million) and Portugal (136 deaths per million),” they noted.

“We note that these countries have already been shown to have an elevated vulnerability to heat in previous years and periods,” the study said, also exposing further social inequalities.

“Climate projections indicate that the 1.5°C limit is likely to be exceeded before 2027, leaving us a very small window of opportunity to act”, said Joan Ballester Claramunt, principal investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant EARLY-ADAPT, in a statement.