Experts: Austria needs a heat warning system

Not all heat is the same, as its appearance can vary significantly, even in geographically small areas. If you take Vienna’s 14th district, you can see that it contains regions that are very urban and characterized by relatively old buildings, and at the same time there are areas that are slightly higher, almost directly in the Vienna Forest, Klimek explains. responsible for the “HeatProtect at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) in Vienna.

The aim is to determine in the future where health problems are likely to increase due to heat, on the smallest possible scale and over time. This is anything but trivial, because it remains to be seen what consequences the overall warming could have in detail – the number of tropical nights in Austria’s major cities has more than doubled in the last thirty years – and various future scenarios that point even further upwards in the future in terms of temperature are reflected regionally. The same applies to the consequences of all this for an ageing population, with many people suffering from multiple diseases at the same time, and ultimately for the way in which operations in hospitals, nursing homes or the number of emergency services are called.

The CSH team is trying to do all this with partners from the Medical University of Vienna, the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Patient Safety, Caritas Vienna, Johanniter Austria, Gesundheit Österreich GmbH (GÖG) and to bring the UBIMET weather service under one roof. “For this project we can draw on a wealth of data from 57 million hospital admissions over 22 years, 50,000 ambulance journeys, 10 million high-resolution time series weather data points and survey data from paramedics, nurses and hospitals on how to deal with heat, which we can understand the links between heat episodes and take a closer look at the pressure on the healthcare system,” Klimek said in a CSH broadcast.

Austria experiences up to 500 heat-related deaths per year
In Austria, there are on average 500 heat deaths per year, it was recently said at the presentation of the ‘National Heat Protection Plan’, which was revised after seven years. From a research perspective, the project, which runs until 2026, also aims to close ‘knowledge gaps’. For example, the complexity researcher explained the delay with which excess mortality increases after heat waves and how certain diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, worsen as a result: “The question is whether certain types of diseases occur more often during heat waves that would otherwise not have happened. It’s not that easy to answer.” It’s also clear that global warming could change the course of people’s diseases: “But there’s still a lot that isn’t understood.”

From heat detectors to cooling centers
Ultimately, in addition to ‘heat detectors for certain nursing homes or hospitals’, we also want to collect information about where measures need to be taken in the longer term. Where heat congestion needs to be reduced, for example by greening areas or improving urban spatial planning, setting up ‘cooling centers’ or declaring regional car-free days at short notice. An important factor at the “Grätzel level” is the building stock, which can sometimes appear extremely heated for weeks after the peak of the heat episodes.