Climate change caused an average 26 more days of extreme heat around the world over the past 12 months, according to a report by the International Red Cross Climate Center released today.

To calculate the number of “extra” hot days due to greenhouse gas emissions, the report, written in collaboration with the scientific network World Weather Attribution (WWA) and the non-governmental organization Climate Central, recorded from May 15, 2023 to 15 May 2024 the days when the temperature was 90% warmer than that recorded in the period 1991-2020.

The scientists then analyzed, using a peer-reviewed method, the influence of climate change on each of these extra days of extreme heat.

They concluded that global warming made extreme temperatures twice as likely to be recorded over a 26-day period on average around the world. For this reason, these days are considered “extra” heat days.

And most of the world’s population experienced heatwaves last year, with 6.3 billion people—about 78% of humanity—facing at least 31 days of extreme heat.

A total of 76 extreme heat waves they were recorded in 90 different countries, on all continents except Antarctica.

The five most affected countries are in Latin America: Suriname with 182 days of heat, compared to the estimated 24 that would have been recorded in the absence of climate change, Ecuador (with 180 days instead of 10), Guyana (174 instead of 33) , El Salvador (163 instead of 15) and Panama (149 instead of 12).

“Floods and typhoons are on the front pages of newspapers, but the effects of extreme heat are just as deadly,” said Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFCR).

“Tens of thousands of people are known to have died due to extreme heat in the past 12 months, but the real toll is probably in the hundreds of thousands or millions,” the organization estimated, explaining that the heatwaves “exacerbate existing health problems.”

In Europe benchmark research had attributed the death of 61,672 people to the summer heat of 2022.

Extreme heat “has devastating consequences for human health, basic infrastructure, the economy, agriculture and the environment,” said Aditya V. Bahadur, director of IFCR’s Climate Center. He called for emergency response services to be strengthened, the organization of urban space and the safety of workers around the world to be improved.