PARIS, Oct 28 — Climate change must be declared a “global health emergency” to shape governments’ policies after heat caused three million deaths between 2016 and 2023, a report in The Lancet said today.
Published by the British medical journal ahead of the COP 31 climate summit in November, the 10th edition of the report brought together 146 researchers from 30 countries to assess the impact of climate change 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 per cent of that toll linked to human-caused climate change.
Marina Romanello, the executive director of the health and climate research project Lancet Countdown, said there were “three million heat-related deaths globally in an eight-year span since the Paris Agreement” of 2015.
