Abstract
Heat causes (or exacerbates) various illness, including heat stroke, circulatory diseases, respiratory diseases, infectious diseases, accidents and suicides. Because of these diverse impacts on health, we evaluated heat-related excess mortality using all-cause mortality as the outcome and statistical model in its definition; the excess risk beyond the minimum mortality temperature (=MMT) is regarded as the heat-related excess mortality. Based on the whole Japanese data for about 4 decades of observation, we found the MMT can be estimated using 84th percentile of daily maximum temperature. Using this finding, we performed a projection of heat-related excess mortality; with no adaptation, the world’s heat-related excess deaths attributable to climate change was more than 90,000 in 2030 and 255,000 in 2050. Autonomous adaptation, i.e., MMT shift along with warming, has been observed in some countries; we also took this phenomenon into account. With the autonomous adaptation, the future impact would be smaller, but the speed of adaptation is still unknown, and further research is needed.
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This chapter is based on some studies supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (S-14) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency.
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Honda, Y., Onozuka, D. (2020). Heat-Related Mortality/Morbidity in East Asia. In: Akhtar, R. (eds) Extreme Weather Events and Human Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23773-8_10
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