Europe is the fastest warming continent and its temperatures are rising about twice as fast as the global average, two major climate monitoring organizations said Monday, warning of consequences for human health as melting glaciers and economic activity.
The UN’s World Meteorological Organization and the European Union’s climate agency, Copernicus, said in a joint report that the continent has an opportunity to develop targeted strategies to accelerate the transition to renewable resources such as l. wind, solar and hydroelectric energy, in response to the effects of climate change.
The continent produced 43% of its electricity from renewable resources last year, up from 36% the year before, the agencies said in their report on the state of Europe’s climate last year. In Europe, for the second year in a row, more energy was produced from renewable sources than from fossil fuels.
The latest five-year averages show that temperatures in Europe are now 2.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, compared to 1.3 degrees Celsius higher globally, the report says – just below targets of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“Europe has experienced another year of rising temperatures and intensifying climate extremes, including heat stress with record temperatures, wildfires, heatwaves, glacier loss and a lack of rainfall. snow,” said Elisabeth Hamdouch, deputy head of the Copernicus unit at the European Union’s executive branch.
The report is a continental complement to the World Meteorological Organization’s flagship report on the state of the global climate, published annually for three decades, and this year comes with a “red alert” warning that the world is not doing enough to combat the consequences of global warming.
Copernicus reported that March marked the tenth consecutive month of record monthly temperatures. The average ocean surface temperature in Europe reached its highest annual level in 2023, according to the European report.
The consequences already felt
The European report this year focuses on the impact of high temperatures on human health, noting that heat-related deaths have increased across the continent. Last year, more than 150 people lost their lives due to storms, floods and wildfires.
The cost of economic losses linked to weather and climate conditions in 2023 has been estimated at more than 13.4 billion euros.
“Hundreds of thousands of people were affected by extreme weather events in 2023, which were responsible for significant losses at the continental level, estimated at at least tens of billions of euros,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus .
Extreme weather conditions have fueled heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods, the report said. High temperatures have contributed to the loss of ice from glaciers across the continent, including in the Alps, which have lost about 10% of their remaining glacial ice over the past two years.
The report’s authors nonetheless pointed out some exceptions, such as below-average temperatures in Scandinavia and Iceland, even though the mercury was above average across much of the continent as a whole.