What is heat stress and where is most affected in Europe?

The world is grappling with a “sharp rise” in dangerous heat stress, as our reliance on fossil fuels continues to bake the planet.

According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), temperatures in Europe have increased by an estimated 2.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels despite efforts to stop global warming, making it the fastest-warming continent on Earth.

But researchers have now gone beyond analysing just the outside air temperature and have started to study ‘feels-like temperatures’ to understand more of the impact on people.

‘Feels like’ temperatures measure how hot or cold the weather feels to bare human skin. Rather than just using the standard air temperature, which you often see on forecasts, ‘feels like’ temperatures adjust for environmental factors like wind speed, humidity, as well as experts’ understanding of how heat is lost from the human body.

A new study, published in the science journal Nature, warns that extreme ‘feels-like’ temperatures, heat stress days and tropical nights – where the temperature doesn’t drop below 20°C during a 24-hour period – have all become “dramatically more frequent”.