Exhaustion

The association between ambient air temperature and mortality has not been assessed in Norway. This study aimed to quantify for seven Norwegian cities (Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Drammen, Fredrikstad, Trondheim and Tromsø) the non-accidental, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases mortality burden due to non-optimal ambient temperatures.

Older adults are generally among the most vulnerable to heat and cold. While temperature-related health impacts are projected to increase with global warming, the influence of population ageing on these trends remains unclear. Our findings indicate that population ageing constitutes a crucial driver for future heat- and cold-related deaths, with increasing mortality burden for both heat and cold due to the ageing population.

Ground-level ozone—a product of reactions between other atmospheric pollutants—can trigger coughing and shortness of breath, worsen asthma, and cause damage to airways. Short-term exposure to ground-level ozone can lead to respiratory and cardiovascular disease and has been linked to higher rates of premature death. Climate change and changes in the atmospheric concentrations of ozone precursor pollutants are projected to increase ground-level ozone in many parts of the world.

Exposure to cold spells is associated with mortality. However, little is known about the global mortality burden of cold spells.

Climate change can directly impact temperature-related excess deaths and might subsequently change the seasonal variation in mortality. In this study, we aimed to provide a systematic and comprehensive assessment of potential future changes in the seasonal variation, or seasonality, of mortality across different climate zones.

In our study, we examined the possible modification of the heat effects on total and cause-specific mortality by air pollution at municipality level in the Attica region, Greece, during the warm period of the years 2000 to 2016. Our results support the evidence of elevated heat effects on mortality at higher levels of PM10 and 8 h max O3. Under climate change, any policy lowering air pollution levels will yield significant public health benefits.

As the climate warms, increasing heat-related health risks are expected, and can be exacerbated by the urban heat island (UHI) effect. UHIs can also offer protection against cold weather, but a clear quantification of their impacts on human health across diverse cities and seasons is still being explored. Here we provide a 500 m resolution assessment of mortality risks associated with UHIs for 85 European cities in 2015-2017. The findings urge strategies aimed at designing healthier cities to consider the seasonality of UHI impacts and to account for social costs, their controlling factors, and intra-urban variability.

Background: Epidemiological evidence on the health risks of sulfur dioxide (SO2) is more limited compared with other pollutants, and doubts remain on several aspects, such as the form of the exposure-response relationship, the potential role of co-pollutants, as well as the actual risk at low concentrations and possible temporal variation in risks.

The associations between ambient coarse particulate matter (PM2.5–10) and daily mortality are not fully understood globally. We collected daily mortality (total, cardiovascular, and respiratory) and air pollution data from 205 cities in 20 countries/regions. This study provides novel global evidence on the robust and independent associations between short-term exposure to ambient PM2.5–10 and total, cardiovascular, and respiratory mortality, suggesting the need to establish a unique guideline or regulatory limit for daily concentrations of PM2.5–10.

Studies have investigated the effects of heat and temperature variability (TV) on mortality. However, few assessed whether TV modifies the heat-mortality association.TV was calculated as the standard deviation of the average of the same and previous days’ minimum and maximum temperatures.TV had a significant modification effect on the heat-mortality association, causing a higher heat-related mortality burden with increments of TV. Implementing targeted strategies against heat exposure and fluctuant temperatures simultaneously would benefit public health.

Previous studies have reported a decrease in air pollution levels following the enforcement of lockdown measures during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these investigations were mostly based on simple pre-post comparisons using past years as a reference and did not assess the role of different policy interventions. This study contributes to knowledge by quantifying the association between specific lockdown measures and the decrease in NO2, O3, PM2.5, and PM10 levels across 47 European cities.

New gridded climate datasets (GCDs) on spatially resolved modelled weather data have recently been released to explore the impacts of climate change. GCDs have been suggested as potential alternatives to weather station data in epidemiological assessments of the health impacts of temperature and climate change. We found that despite different temperature observations the datasets yield very similar results. In particular, high-resolution population-weighted temperature datasets showed better performance. Thus it can be a good alternative to weather stations, especially in densely populated urban areas with large intracity temperature variability.