Konsekvenser av värmeböljan i juli 2010

With climate change heat waves will become more common and longer and therefore society needs to prepare itself on handling them. In this report we do a literature review of what has been written about the impacts of heat waves in Sweden and we also do an inventory of what local press in Skåne and Mälardalen wrote about the impacts of the heat wave that occurred in July 2010. In the report a definition of heat waves as an average daily temperature exceeding 22-23 degrees during more than two consecutive days is used which is based on health impacts in Sweden and it is established that almost all towns in Skåne and Mälardalen had a heat wave in July 2010. The literature review shows that the knowledge about the impacts of heat waves on the Swedish society is relatively small and above all the matter has been studied since 2007 and then in the light of the climate change. The inventory of local press shows that the heat influences the activity in several different sectors important to the society such as care, transports, foodstuffs, municipal technical maintenance and internal protection and security. Examples of impacts are more dehydrated patients in hospitals and health care centres, residents in elderly care homes that feel ill at ease, tired personnel, troublesome bugs and parasites, sun curves on rail, overheated buses with tired drivers, lack of waters within the agriculture, cows that do not milk as usual, foodstuffs that do not hold the measure, lack of drinking waters, fires and thefts. But also positive impacts are noted for certain operators e.g. fan and ice cream sellers and those who rent canoes. We also point out a row of new study areas such as following up what various practitioners learnt from the heat wave 2010, how a cost benefit analysis could be used in order to oversee the relevance of the current advice about heat in rooms and premises, to what extent different divides of the business community can deduct advantages of heat waves and continued studies about heat as a security problem.