Health risks of extreme temperatures on mortality and ambulance operations in Finland

Climate change is expected to increase various health effects on human health such as  increased temperature-related mortality and morbidity and spread of different vector or viral borne new diseases. Finland is a sparsely populated country which generates challenges and uncertainties in modelling heat-related mortality and morbidity.

In this presentation, we will present preliminary results on future temperature-mortality relationships from different wellbeing areas in Finland using mortality and climate model data. In the results we will show how future projections of heat-related mortality will look like until 2100 with selected CMIP6 models under two climate change scenarios, SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5. Heat-related mortality is heterogeneous in different regions of the country and in the future the most heat vulnerable areas are found in the capital region and the southern parts of Finland. For other regions, such as the northern, central and western parts of the country the results are mixed and present only a slight increase in the heat-related mortality change.

Extreme temperatures also influence on ambulance operations in various ways. We will show examples how ambulance operations are affected by extreme temperatures in Helsinki applying a distributed lag nonlinear model (DLNM). Understanding associations between weather and different emergency service operations is important for resource management and preparing for the future.

Modelling future heat-related mortality and analyzing ambulance service weather dependencies include limitations and uncertainties and these factors are also discussed from different perspectives. Longer and more frequent heatwaves might also lead to higher than estimated mortality rates in other regions of the country than expected and thus people living in these areas should also implement heatwave adaptation plans.