Once again, thousands of French people died from the heat during the summer of 2023

“Everyone is affected”, summarized Thursday, during a press conference, Caroline Semaille, director of the Public Health France agency, who presented an assessment of heat-related mortality in the summer of 2023.

This turned out to be the fourth hottest ever observed in France, where the first measurements date back to 1900, with a rather unusual profile.

Several regions, particularly in the north, have indeed experienced weeks of gloomy weather. But four heatwaves followed one another during this summer, with an exceptionally late character for two of them, the longest in August and the last in September.

Although it is impossible to attribute each episode of intense heat to global warming, we know that it promotes more and more frequent heatwaves. And 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded on the planet.

For what health consequences? According to estimates from the public health agency, 5.167 deaths last summer were attributable to heat, or three deaths out of 100.

If we focus on heatwaves alone - periods of intense heat that last at least three days - one in ten deaths was attributable to the heat, or around 1.500 deaths.

“Underestimated” workplace deaths?

The 2023 numbers are in the high range of recent years, including looking through the entire summer. Certainly, we are far from the 15.000 deaths attributed to the violent heatwave of 2003, which acted like an electric shock and led to an alert system - the heatwave plan - created in France the following year.

But the dangerous summers keep coming. Already in the summer of 2022, some 7.000 deaths were linked to heat, even if it is difficult to distinguish the role played by a still fairly active Covid epidemic.

“We are in a context of climate change, these exposures to heat will tend to increase over time,” underlined Sébastien Denys, who oversees environmental issues at SpF.

The oldest are, as always, the first threatened by the heat. Of the approximately 5.000 deaths attributed to it last summer, around 3.700 concerned those over 75.

But, implicitly, this also reflects significant mortality among the rest of the population.

Several factors contribute to the vulnerability of the elderly: poorly insulated housing, practicing sport without taking into account the intense heat and, above all, overly exposed working conditions, such as on construction sites.

Last summer, around ten deaths at work were considered potentially heat-related, following a census by the labor inspectorate.

But this is probably an "underestimation", warned Guillaume Boulanger, researcher at Public Health France, explaining for example that a death can occur several days after exposure to heat and, thus, pass between the census meshes.

“It is difficult (...) to measure the overall burden linked to exposure to heat in the workplace,” he regretted.