Climate change driving ‘record threats to health’: report

Climate change is propelling a range of threats to health, including droughts that have hit the yields of important food crops – Copyright ${image.metadata.node.credit} ${image.metadata.node.creator}

Daniel Lawler

Climate change poses a growing threat to human health in a variety of record-breaking ways, a major report said Wednesday, the experts warning that “wasted time has been paid in lives”.

The new report was released as heatwaves, fires, hurricanes, droughts and floods have lashed the world during what is expected to surpass 2023 to become the hottest year on record.

It also comes just weeks before the United Nations COP29 talks are held in Azerbaijan — and days before a US election that could see climate change sceptic Donald Trump return to the White House. 

The eighth Lancet Countdown on health and climate change, developed by 122 experts including from UN agencies such as the World Health Organization, painted a dire picture of death and delay.

Out of 15 indicators that the experts have been tracking over the last eight years, 10 have “reached concerning new records,” the report said.

These included the increasing extreme weather events, elderly deaths from heat, spread of infectious diseases, and people going without food as droughts and floods hit crops.

Lancet Countdown executive director Marina Romanello told AFP the report showed there are “record threats to the health and survival of people in every country, to levels we have never seen before”.

– ‘Fuelling the fire’ –

The number of over-65s who died from heat has risen by 167 percent since the 1990s, the report said. 

Rising temperatures have also increased the area where mosquitoes roam, taking deadly diseases with them.

Last year saw a new record of over five million cases of dengue worldwide, the report noted.

Around five percent of the world’s tree cover was destroyed between 2016 and 2022, reducing Earth’s capacity to capture the carbon dioxide humans are emitting.

It also tracked how oil and gas companies — as well as some governments and banks — were “fuelling the fire” of climate change.

Despite decades of warnings, global emissions of the main greenhouse gases rose again last year, the World Meteorological Organization said earlier this week.

Large oil and gas companies, which have been posting record profits, have increased fossil fuel production since last year, the report said.

Many countries also handed out fresh subsidies to fossil fuels to counteract soaring oil and gas prices after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Fossil fuel subsidies amounted to $1.4 trillion in 2022, which is “vastly more than any source of commitments to enable a transition to a healthier future,” Romanello said.

– ‘No more time to waste’ –

But there were also “some very encouraging signs of progress,” she added.

For example, deaths from fossil fuel-related air pollution fell by nearly seven percent to 2.10 million from 2016 to 2021, mainly due to efforts to reduce pollution from burning coal, the report said.

The share of clean renewables used to generate electricity nearly doubled over the same period to 10.5 percent, it added.

And there are signs that climate negotiations are paying more attention to health, Romanello said, pointing to the COP talks and national climate plans to be submitted early next year.

“If action is not taken today, the future will be very dangerous,” she warned.

“There is really no more time to waste — I know we have been saying this for many years — but what we are seeing is that the wasted time has been paid in lives.”

For people at home, Romanello advised a climate-friendly diet, travelling without burning dirty energy, ditching banks that invest in fossil fuels and voting for politicians promising greater action on global warming.