PARIS — Climate change must be declared a “global health emergency” to shape governments’ policies after heat caused 3 million deaths between 2016 and 2023, a report in The Lancet said Wednesday.
Published by the British medical journal ahead of the COP31 summit in November, the 10th edition of the report brought together 146 researchers from 30 countries to assess the impact on the health of the world’s population.
It said there were a record 710,000 heat-related deaths in 2023, with more than 70 percent of that toll linked to human causes.
Marina Romanello, the executive director of the health and research project Lancet Countdown, said there were “three million heat-related deaths globally in an eight-year span since the Paris Agreement” of 2015.
“That’s roughly equivalent to the entire population of Wales being wiped out in the space of eight years due to heat,” she told a news conference.
And “68 percent of those deaths are directly attributable to.” The legally binding international treaty adopted in the French capital aimed to limit global warming to well below 2 C and pursue efforts to keep it to 1.5 C compared to pre-industrial levels.
Romanello said the global health emergency should have “an integrated approach so that we’re not responding to emergency after emergency.”
Instead, she called for “a cohesive long-term response that builds resilience, builds capacities, and builds the possibilities of countries to avoid further emergencies moving forward.”
To determine the share of deaths attributable to warming caused by human activity, the researchers compiled the number of heat-related deaths recorded by states, then subtracted those that would have occurred in the absence of, said Professor Ollie Jay of the University of Sydney.
Jay said the intensity and frequency of periods of intense heat were amplified by, pointing out that last year an extreme drought affected more than half of the world’s land surface for at least one month.
By reducing worker productivity, warming has cost the global economy more than 1 trillion dollars per year over the past three years, the researchers said.
Southeast Asia and Africa, the hardest-hit regions, are estimated to have lost the equivalent of 3.9 percent and 3.2 percent of their GDP, compared with 0.2 percent for Europe and 1.5 percent for the Americas.
However, there has been concrete progress in some areas.
Since 2016, 56 of the WHO’s 194 member states have adapted their health and early-warning systems to anticipate extreme events.
