Skip to content

Lancet Countdown calls climate change a health emergency as heat deaths hit record

The 2026 Lancet Countdown report estimates that heat was linked to about 710,000 deaths in 2023 and, for the first time, attributes more than 70% of that toll to human-caused warming.

Science

By Comlumen Desk Compiled stories

3 min read

Compiled by the Comlumen Desk from the reporting and official sources listed at the end of this story, and written with AI assistance. It contains no original reporting by Comlumen. How we report

Brown, dried-out grass in a city park under a hazy sky
Parched grass in a London park during a summer drought. Alisdare Hickson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

In this story
  1. Heat deaths at a record
  2. Other indicators
  3. Where the report finds gains
  4. In their words
  5. How this story was sourced

The tenth global report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change, published in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet on 27 October 2026, concludes that the health harms of a warming climate grew over the past decade. Its authors call for climate change to be recognised as a global health emergency.

How this story was sourced.

7 sources from 5 organisations, 6 of them official or primary documents.

Official and primary documents 6

The body that made the decision, the paper, or the organisation’s own release.

  1. The Lancet The 2026 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change thelancet.com
  2. The Lancet via EurekAlert Experts call for climate change to be declared a global health emergency eurekalert.org
  3. Lancet Countdown The 2026 Global Report lancetcountdown.org
  4. Lancet Countdown 2026 visual summary data.lancetcountdown.org
  5. WHO Climate change is a growing health emergency, Lancet Countdown warns who.int
  6. United Nations COP31 to take place 9-20 November 2026 in Antalya, Türkiye un.org

News organisations 1

Reports by other newsrooms. Where a story was carried by another outlet, both are named.

  1. ABC News Climate change is a 'global health emergency' and the harms are accelerating, Lancet report warns abcnews.com
The sources as the story lists them

Sources

Comlumen Desk Compiled stories
Stories under the Comlumen Desk byline are compiled from reporting by other news organisations and from official sources, and written with AI assistance. They contain no original reporting by Comlumen. Every source is listed and linked at the end of each story, and facts are attributed in the text to the organisation that reported them. How we report.

The story so far. More on Climate, Health and Heat.

  1. Science Greenhouse gas levels reached new records in 2025, WMO bulletin says Carbon dioxide averaged 426.8 parts per million at the Earth's surface last year, the World Meteorological Organization said on 27 October, with methane and nitrous oxide also at record highs.
  2. Technology Hackers tamper with fridges storing France's blood plasma; alarms prevent losses Attackers raised temperature settings at three cold-storage sites of France's national blood service overnight on 1 to 2 November 2026, through a refrigeration contractor. The service says no blood products were lost.
  3. Science More US newborns are missing the vitamin K shot, and bleeding risk is higher, study finds A JAMA study of more than 5.2 million US births found the share of newborns not given vitamin K more than doubled between 2017 and 2025, and those infants had higher rates of bleeding, including bleeding in the brain.
  4. Science Base editing corrects alpha-1 antitrypsin gene defect in a patient's liver, case report shows A one-off infusion of an experimental base-editing therapy corrected more than half of the faulty gene copies in a 66-year-old man's liver. The peer-reviewed evidence so far is that single case.
More Science
Made byStacklumen