The message from Lancet is clear: Inaction on climate change costs millions of lives every year. Launched in the months following the Paris Agreement in 2015, the "countdown" in the leading British medical research journal finds in its ninth issue that the human toll of the ongoing climate change is worsening. This work, conducted by 300 researchers worldwide under the auspices of University College London, relies on 20 health indicators that aggregate mortality due to droughts, heat waves, extreme events (floods, storms), and also takes into account the transmission of viral diseases attributable to a global rise in temperatures. Of the 20 indicators monitoring the risks and effects of climate change on health included in this report, 13 set new records in the last year for which data are available.states the summary note of Lancet.
Thus, globally, 16 of the 19 days of extreme heat that humanity experienced on average in 2024 would not have occurred without climate change. Exposure of infants under one year old and adults over 65 to life-threatening extreme temperatures has increased by 3,041 times per 100,000 years for babies and by 3,891 times per 100,000 years for the elderly compared to the average exposure from 1986 to 2005—a dramatic increase in health risk in less than three decades. Consequently, deaths attributable to high temperatures have increased by 631 times per 100,000 years since the 1990s. At the beginning of the 2020s, the average stands at 546,000 deaths per year. Longer and more intense droughts generate forest fires, which also have health impacts due to the emission of fine particulate matter into the air. This air pollution caused 154,000 deaths in 2024 alone.
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