Extreme heat and health: a report calls for a global health emergency status

The tenth Lancet Countdown report, compiled by 146 experts from 71 institutions, brings together 54 indicators to track the impact of climate change on public health worldwide. Among the data reported, the document links extreme heat to over 540,000 deaths a year in the 2016-2023 period: this is an aggregate estimate on a global scale, which connects exposure to high temperatures to an excess mortality observed in historical series, not a count of individual cases attributed individually to climate.

The news currently comes from a single source (Diario del Web); no independent confirmation is available at the time of publication.

The report identifies six priorities for action. Among these, the development of a World Health Organization tool designed to enable the formal recognition of the climate crisis as a global health emergency — a classification that would have consequences for funding, international coordination and health response priorities, but which at present remains a proposal by the report’s authors, not a decision taken either by the WHO or by any government.

The document falls within the strand of periodic reviews that for a decade have been monitoring the interplay between climate and health, updating the same 54 indicators every year to make trends over time comparable. It is not a clinical study on a defined sample, but a synthesis of epidemiological and environmental data collected from various sources: the strength of the exercise lies in the continuity of the measurement, not in the demonstration of a specific causal mechanism between a single heat event and a single death.

The gap between the authors’ request and the institutions that should adopt it remains open to this day: the WHO has not yet adopted the proposed recognition tool, nor have governments formalized the state of emergency invoked by the report.