Throughout April and continuing into May 2024, extreme record-breaking heat led to severe impacts across the Asian continent.
From Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, in the West, to Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines in the East, large regions of Asia experienced temperatures well above 40°C for many days. The heat was particularly difficult for people living in refugee camps and informal housing, as well as for outdoor workers.
Heatwaves are arguably the deadliest type of extreme weather event and while the death toll is often underreported, hundreds of deaths have been reported already in most of the affected countries, including Palestine, Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and the Philippines. The heat also had a large impact on agriculture, causing crop damage and reduced yields, as well as on education, with holidays having to be extended and schools closed in several countries, affecting millions of students.
Extreme heat in South Asia during the pre-monsoon season is becoming more frequent. Two previous World Weather Attribution studies focused on extreme heat events in the region: the 2022 India and Pakistan heatwaveand the 2023 humid heatwave that hit India, Bangladesh, Lao PDR and Thailand. Despite differences in the nature and impact of the events (drier heat in 2022 leading to widespread loss of harvest, and humid heat in 2023 with greater impacts on people), both studies found that human-induced climate change influenced the events, making them around 30 times more likely and much hotter.
Scientists from Lebanon, Sweden, Malaysia, the Netherlands, the United States and the United Kingdom collaborated to assess to what extent human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the extreme heat in three Asian regions: 1) West Asia, including Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan; 2) the Philippines in East Asia; and 3) South and Southeast Asia, including India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Lao PDR, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia.
Using published peer-reviewed methods, the scientists analysed how human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the 3-day April heatwave in West Asia and a 15-day April heatwave in the Philippines. Figure 1 shows these two regions, outlined in blue, while figure 2 shows the South Asia region. For this region, the analysis focused on observed weather data, but not climate models, as the affected region largely overlaps with the study areas of the previous studies. The observational data for the whole month of April confirmed that the role of climate change is likely of similar magnitude to the heatwaves studied in 2022 and 2023, and the results of a full attribution analysis would not be significantly different.
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Le journal du peintre 2 