More than half a million Belgians couldn't keep their homes warm last year, as soaring energy prices and general high inflation left many citizens unable to stave off the winter chill – or even, in some cases, death.
According to a recent study by the EU's official statistics office Eurostat, 5.1% of the Belgian population, or roughly 595,000 people, were incapable of properly heating their homes in 2022. This represents an increase of 185,000 people (or 1.6 percentage points) compared to the previous year.
Despite the increase, Belgians proved more adept at staying warm than the majority of other Europeans. A total of 41.5 million EU citizens (or 9.3% of the bloc's population) couldn't adequately heat their homes last year: 10.7 million (or 2.4 percentage points) more than in 2021.
The proportion of the population who couldn't stay warm was also lower in Belgium than in most neighbouring countries, including France (10.9%), Germany (6.6%), and the Netherlands (5.3%). Luxembourg (2.1%) fared better than Belgium, however.
Winter peril
It is also highly likely that Belgians' failure to stay warm contributed to a significant spike in excess mortality last year. Indeed, Belgium's official statistics office Statbel recently reported a 16.2% increase in deaths in December 2022 compared to the average mortality rate over the previous four years.
Statbel noted that "there is no unequivocal explanation" for the "higher than usual number of deaths", suggesting instead that it was likely due to "a combination of several factors".
However, Statbel reported that Covid-19-related mortality was "rather limited" in December last year and explicitly mentioned that a "cold snap" in December might well have contributed to the high number of deaths.
The Eurostat and Statbel reports are usefully juxtaposed with another recent analysis by The Economist, which estimated that up to 68,000 Europeans died as a result of high energy prices last winter.
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"High energy prices can cost lives," the study noted. "They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems."
Taken together, these studies allow a plausible – but nevertheless provisional – estimate of the number of Belgians who died as a result of high energy prices last winter.
In particular, the Eurostat data implies that 1.4% of the 41.5 million Europeans who couldn't stay warm last year were Belgians.
Assuming that the excess mortality figures reported by The Economist were evenly distributed among EU Member States (admittedly a questionable assumption, given the discrepancy in healthcare quality across the bloc), this entails that nearly 1,000 Belgians died in 2022 as a result of high energy prices.
This result is consistent with Statbel's own finding that there were roughly 4,000 excess deaths in Belgium last year.
In other words, it could well be that a quarter of last year's additional deaths in Belgium – which is, by some metrics, the world's richest country – were a direct result of citizens' inability to stay warm.
