Hello and welcome to the evidence from the BBC World Service.
I'm Claudia Hammond and in this series we take a single health issue and we delve deep into the research behind it.
And we've come to the Sofia Science Festival in beautiful Sofia,
Bulgaria, where I'm joined by a live audience.
Do say hello, audience.
Hello.
Thank you for that.
Now, the weather has been really nice and sunny since I've been here.
It's been a lovely temperature because it's not too hot.
But we have seen hundreds of air conditioning units on the back of buildings.
And I know that it actually can get very hot here in Bulgaria,
to the point that the country experienced the second highest number of deaths related to the heat in Europe in 2023.
Only Greece had more.
Now, of all the extreme weather that we see, heat.
is the most deadly.
In the US, for example,
it kills more people in an average year than hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods combined.
And it's not just in Europe and the US.
As a result of climate change in many parts of the world,
the number of people dying from the heat is on the rise.