A New Report Finds That Climate Change is the World’s Worst Public Health Crisis

A report released Wednesday by the Lancet Countdown calls climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century,” and warns that if it is not addressed, disease, poor air quality, and food insecurity will threaten millions of people. 

Pollution from recent wildfires forced people in
San Francisco to wear face masks outdoors.

The report, written by a team of international researchers, focuses on several climate-related impacts, including extreme heat and its effect on labor productivity and the spread of disease. In 2017, 153 billion hours of labor were lost due to heat—an increase of more than 62 billion hours since 2000. This correlates with a rise in exposure to heat waves and extreme weather events such as hurricanes and wildfires that have already made thousands of climate refugees and are expected to create millions more.

Many of those refugees, one of the report’s author notes, are American. In a press call on Tuesday, Renee Salas, a doctor of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the Lancet Countdown US Brief, described a recent experience close to home. “I had a patient who came from Puerto Rico, came with bag of luggage, bag of medication she hasn’t taken in days. She was truly a climate refugee who was in my emergency department,” Salas said. “I can’t think of a population more at risk of health effects than a displaced individual.”

Read the Mother Jones story by Rowan Walrath and Rebecca Leber - “A New Report Finds That Climate Change is the World’s Worst Public Health Crisis.”