At 1.1°C of global heating, climate change is already having profound impacts on the socioeconomic and environmental conditions that human health and wellbeing depend on, making it the greatest threat to global health of this century. Monitoring the changing hazards of climate change is essential to identify populations at risk, and to develop adaptive and coping capacity mechanisms that can help minimise the associated health impacts.
Indicators presented here estimate changes in climate-related health risks driven by changing climatic conditions under different climate change scenarios, assuming no changes in adaptation. These build on the indicators of the Lancet Countdown, to capture the influence of the changing climate on health risks. They therefore help identify the risks that could be avoided through ambitious mitigation, as well as the need for accellerated adaptation efforts to prevent the worst health harms in a heating world.
Indicators in this section cover four key areas: Heat and Health, Wildfires, Infectious Diseases, and Food Insecurity and Undernutrition.
The data exhibit the potentially catastrophic health consequences of climate inaction, and the major health gains that would arise from taking urgent measures today to meet international climate commitments and limit global mean temperature rise to 1.5°C. Importantly they also expose the need for urgent adaptation to protect the most vulnerable populations from the now unavoidable increase in health hazards.
By clicking on the countries in the map, indicators can be explored by domain for each emission scenario: a scenario that assumes no climate policy (compatible with global mean temperature rise of approximately 3.6°C, and SSP3-7); and a scenario in which temperatures are kept below 2°C throughout the century (SSP1-2.6). Data are presented in three time slices, representing the 20-year averages for the the near- (2021-2040), medium- (2041-2060) and long-term (2081-2100) future. Short-term projections in the "below 2°C" scenario are presented as an approximation of the expected change in climate hazards and risks if global mean temperature rise is limited to 1.5°C. Data are presented as absolute or relative (as percentage) change with respect to the baseline period of 1995-2014 for each of the future time slices. The median, maximum and minimum values of the five climate models used are presented.