Rising heat killing one person a minute, major report on climate crisis finds

Governments gave out $2.5bn a day in direct subsidies to fossil fuel companies in 2023, the researchers found, while people lost about the same amount because of high temperatures preventing them from working on farms and building sites.

Rising global heat is now killing one person a minute around the world, a major report on the health impact of the climate crisis has revealed.

It says the world’s addiction to fossil fuels also causes toxic air pollution, wildfires, and the spread of diseases such as dengue fever, and millions each year are dying owing to the failure to tackle global heating.

The report, the most comprehensive to date, says the damage to health will get worse with leaders such as Donald Trump ripping up climate policies and oil companies continuing to exploit new reserves.

Reduced coal burning has saved about 400 lives a day in the last decade, the report says, and renewable energy production is rising fast. But the experts say a healthy future is impossible if fossil fuels continue to be financed at current rates.

Governments gave out $2.5bn a day in direct subsidies to fossil fuel companies in 2023, the researchers found, while people lost about the same amount because of high temperatures preventing them from working on farms and building sites.

Reduced coal burning has saved about 400 lives a day in the last decade, the report says, and renewable energy production is rising fast. But the experts say a healthy future is impossible if fossil fuels continue to be financed at current rates.

Dr Marina Romanello, of University College London (UCL), who led the analysis, said: “This [report] paints a bleak and undeniable picture of the devastating health harms reaching all corners of the world. The destruction to lives and livelihoods will continue to escalate until we end our fossil fuel addiction.

“We’re seeing millions of deaths occurring needlessly every year because of our delay in mitigating climate change and our delay in adapting to the climate change that cannot be avoided. 

We’re seeing key leaders, governments and corporations backsliding on climate commitments and putting people increasingly in harm’s way.

The report says the rate of heat-related deaths has surged by 23% since the 1990s, even after accounting for increases in populations, to an average of 546,000 a year between 2012 and 2021.

“That is approximately one heat-related death every minute throughout the year,” said Prof Ollie Jay, of the University of Sydney, Australia, who was part of the analysis team. 

"It is a really startling number and the numbers are going up. We constantly emphasise to people that heat stress can affect everybody and it can be deadly — I think a lot of people don’t understand that — and that every heat-related death is preventable.”

Laura Clarke, the chief executive of the environmental law firm ClientEarth, said: “We are living through the era of climate consequences. Heatwaves, floods, drought and disease are no longer distant warnings — they’re here now. But as attribution science, climate litigation and grassroots activism grow, accountability for climate impacts is no longer a question of if but when.” 

The 2025 edition of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change was led by UCL in collaboration with the World Health Organization and produced by 128 experts from more than 70 academic institutions and UN agencies.

In the past four years, the average person has been exposed to 19 days a year of life-threatening heat, and 16 of those days would not have happened without human-caused global heating, the report says. 

Overall, exposure to high temperatures resulted in a record 639 billion hours of lost labour in 2024, which caused losses of 6% of national GDP in the least developed nations.

The Guardian

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