Refining methods for attributing health impacts to climate change: a heat-mortality case study in Zürich
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Heat-related deaths occur throughout the summer months, peak during heatwaves, and are affected by temperature and exposed populations’ sensitivities to meteorological conditions. Previous studies found that climate change is increasing heat-related mortality worldwide. We build on existing epidemiological methods to shed light on the adverse effects of climate change on human health. We address limitations in existing methods and apply refined approaches to assess heat mortality attributable to human-induced climate change in Zürich, Switzerland, over 50 years (1969–2018) including a case study of summer 2018. Our methodological refinements affect how counterfactual climate scenarios are derived, and facilitate accounting for changing vulnerability, and assessing impacts during and outside heatwaves. We find nearly 1,700 heat-related deaths attributable to human-induced climate change between 1969 and 2018. Declining vulnerability to heat avoided at least 700 heat-related deaths. The approach described here could be applied elsewhere to quantify the effect of climate change on other health outcomes.
Date Issued
2025-09-01
Date Acceptance
2025-08-08
Citation
Climatic Change, 2025, 178 (9)
ISSN
0165-0009
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Start Page
165
Journal / Book Title
Climatic Change
Volume
178
Issue
9
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2025 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/40950393
PII: 4011
Subjects
Climate change attribution
Climate impacts
Epidemiology
Health.
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
Netherlands
Article Number
165
Date Publish Online
2025-09-10