The report’s authors call for climate change to be formally recognized and addressed as a global health emergency, and for health considerations to be integrated across climate mitigation, adaptation and financing decisions. Priorities include accelerating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, increasing support for adaptation, and expanding investments that strengthen health system resilience.
Geneva: Ahead of COP31, the latest Lancet Countdown report finds that the health impacts of climate change are accelerating, with heat-related deaths, drought and other climate-related risks increasing faster than a decade ago, even as clean energy investments and climate action begin to deliver health benefits.
A decade after the Paris Agreement entered into force, the 2026 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change reports that many climate-related health harms are growing faster than the global response.
The report, produced by an international collaboration of researchers and institutions led by University College London and developed in strategic collaboration with WHO, tracks global trends across 54 indicators linking climate change and health.
According to the report, annual average heat-related deaths increased by nearly 36% in the years following the Paris Agreement compared with the previous decade. In 2023 alone, heat was linked to a record 710 000 deaths globally, with more than 70% of that burden attributable to human-caused climate change.
The report also highlights worsening drought conditions, increasing exposure to hydrological extremes, and substantial economic losses linked to heat exposure.
At the same time, the report points to important progress. Global investment in clean energy reached a record US$ 2.1 trillion in 2025, while many countries that have lowered fossil fuel-related air pollution are estimated to be protecting thousands of people from premature deaths each year. The report also notes advances in climate-resilient health systems, including increased adoption of national health adaptation plans and climate-informed early warning systems.
“Climate change is already harming health in every region of the world, and the evidence shows that many of these impacts are accelerating,” said Dr Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, Head, Climate change, Air Quality and Energy and Health Unit.
“At the same time, this report demonstrates that climate action is a health intervention. Cleaner energy, stronger health systems and early warning systems are saving lives today. As countries prepare for COP31, placing health at the centre of climate policies can help protect communities, strengthen resilience and deliver immediate benefits for people’s health and well-being,” he said.
The report’s authors call for climate change to be formally recognized and addressed as a global health emergency, and for health considerations to be integrated across climate mitigation, adaptation and financing decisions. Priorities include accelerating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, increasing support for adaptation, and expanding investments that strengthen health system resilience.
Key findings:
-Heat exposure caused the loss of 573 billion potential work hours in 2025, costed at $1.07 trillion
-Clean energy jobs grew 2.3 per cent in 2024, almost twice direct fossil fuel employment
-Cleaner air is preventing an estimated 323,000 deaths a year in 70 countries where air pollution from fossil fuels has fallen
-National laws on climate change and health have risen roughly 50-fold since the year 2000 and most have been since 2016
-Wealthy nations accounted for 55 per cent of climate–health laws in 2025, compared to two per cent in developing countries
-Other findings indicate that the global area affected by extreme drought “has grown more than 700 per cent faster than it did in 2006–2015”, with droughts affecting 51.8 per cent of land on earth for at least one month in 2025.
The report also examines the link between rising temperatures and rainfall patterns to dengue transmission, finding that conditions suitable for dengue transmission by Aedes albopictus mosquitoes increased by 24 per cent between 1981-90 and 2016-25, while suitability for transmission by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes rose by seven per cent.
Drilling down
And in a warning that too little is being done to mitigate climate change, the report also notes that the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies plan to produce “150 per cent more fossil fuels by 2040 than is compatible with keeping warming to 1.5°C [above pre-Industrial Revolution temperature averages], up from 138 per cent a year earlier”.
These and other worrying findings highlight the urgent need to formally recognize climate change as a global health emergency, the authors maintain, in support of stronger, health-centred climate action ahead of the UN COP31 climate conference in Antalya, Türkiye.
Priorities include accelerating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, increasing support for adaptation and expanding investments that strengthen health system resilience.
Premature deaths protection
In more positive developments, important progress has been made in resisting the health impacts of climate change, the report notes, pointing to a record $2.1 trillion global investment in clean energy last year.
“Many countries that have lowered fossil fuel-related air pollution are estimated to be protecting thousands of people from premature deaths each year,” it adds.
The report also notes advances in climate-resilient health systems, including increased adoption of national health adaptation plans and climate-based early warning systems.
Around one in four countries now have a national plan for adapting health services to climate change, up from just 14 WHO Member States in 2015; 47 have separately completed a vulnerability assessment to underpin plans.
The development follows a warning by the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other major greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere reached record highs in 2025, locking in more long-term temperature increase for the planet.