Q&A: Europe’s May and June heatwave deaths – and how they were counted

Carbon Brief digs into the different methods scientists and public health agencies have used to tally the deaths from Europe's record-breaking May and June heatwaves. France's national health agency counted two thousand twenty-five excess deaths during the week the June heat peaked, while Germany and the Netherlands put their tolls over the same seven days at five thousand seven hundred fifty-three and five hundred thirty-three. Separate research estimated roughly two thousand seven hundred heat-related deaths across the UK's spring heatwaves, and attributed forty-two percent of them to human-caused climate change. As Carbon Brief explains, there is no single ground truth for heat deaths, since the cause is rarely written on a death certificate, so researchers lean on two main approaches — counting excess deaths against a baseline, or statistical mortality modelling — each with its own strengths and blind spots.

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