Millions more people will die unnecessarily unless the World Health Organization declares the climate crisis a global public health emergency, leading international experts have warned, as a major new report lays out the scale of the threat to human health.
The call comes from the independent Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, an advisory body convened by the WHO’s European regional office, which concluded that the climate crisis now poses such a worldwide danger that the WHO should designate it a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC). Such a declaration is the highest level of health alert the WHO can issue, previously used for infectious disease outbreaks such as Covid-19 and Mpox. While it would not itself reverse climate change, the commissioners said it would trigger the kind of coordinated international response that the scale of the health crisis demands but has so far failed to materialise.
PHEIC: the highest level of health alert
In its report, presented to European ministers on Sunday ahead of the WHO’s World Health Assembly beginning on Monday, the 11-strong commission – which includes former health and climate ministers – argued that the international spread of vector-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya, along with the health impacts of extreme weather, global heating, food insecurity and air pollution, makes a PHEIC necessary. The commission’s final recommendations are expected to be formally unveiled at the World Health Assembly in May 2026. Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the former prime minister of Iceland who chaired the commission, told the Guardian: “The climate crisis may not be a pandemic, but it’s still a public health emergency that threatens humanity’s very health and survival. And if we don’t act more quickly and comprehensively, many millions more people could die or face life-changing illness.”
Sir Andrew Haines, professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the commission’s chief scientific adviser, said: “WHO has already recognised that climate change is a major threat to global health. What we’re asking for is a step further.” He warned: “If we carry on emitting at current rates, that will accelerate the risks to health for both current and future generations including: more people suffering and dying from excess heat, floods and infectious diseases, air pollution from wildfires, more preterm births and more food insecurity.”
Heat, disease and the mental health toll
The report details a range of specific health threats that are already causing death and illness across the world. Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is projected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone, according to WHO projections cited by the commission. Research attributes 37% of heat-related deaths directly to climate change, with heat-related deaths among those over 65 rising by 70% in two decades. In 2022 and 2023 combined, over 100,000 people across 35 countries in the European Region died due to heat, the report notes.
Extreme weather events such as storms, floods and heatwaves are becoming more frequent and intense, directly harming physical health and overwhelming healthcare systems. Food insecurity is escalating: in 2020, approximately 98 million more people experienced food insecurity compared with the 1981–2010 average, as climate-related heat and drought sharply reduce yields of staple crops such as maize and wheat. Warmer environments are also facilitating the spread of mosquito and tick-borne diseases – including dengue, malaria, West Nile fever and tick-borne encephalitis – into new areas, including central and northern European countries that previously had little or no exposure. The report also emphasises that climate change is a significant contributor to mental health problems, driving anxiety, post-traumatic stress and long-term disorders linked to displacement and disrupted social cohesion.
Air pollution from fossil fuels is a major driver of premature death globally. The commission’s report highlights that ambient air pollution from fossil fuel use generates an estimated 5.13 million excess deaths per year worldwide, while in Europe alone fossil fuels are directly responsible for 600,000 premature deaths annually. “Far from being a fading priority or fake news, climate change poses an immediate and long-term threat to health, economic, food, water, environmental, personal, community and national security,” the commissioners said in their report.
Policy recommendations: subsidies, resilience and disinformation
The commission urged governments to stop subsidising fossil fuels, describing current spending levels as a public health failure. European governments spend approximately €444 billion (£387 billion) a year on subsidies for oil and gas production, the report said. In 12 European countries, fossil fuel subsidies exceeded 10% of national health expenditure in 2023, and in four countries they exceeded the entire health budget. A study cited in the report found that a 1% increase in fossil fuel subsidies per capita led to a 0.05% decrease in domestic health expenditure per capita. The commission noted that 95% of these subsidies are implicit – meaning governments fail to charge industries for local damage such as health costs from air pollution – and that removing them could increase economic welfare and generate substantial government revenue. Jakobsdóttir said: “European governments are subsidising the very industries responsible for their own citizens’ premature deaths. We need health leaders to really step into the climate debate and not just be on the receiving end of it.”
The report also called for healthcare systems to become more resilient to the rapidly changing environment. Haines pointed out that hospitals are often built on floodplains and are frequently not energy efficient, adding: “Even in the UK, which is a temperate country, we know that many hospitals struggle when it comes to extreme heat. Many of the buildings were designed before climate change.” The healthcare sector itself accounts for 5% of global emissions, the commission noted, and must prioritise adaptation alongside decarbonisation. Other recommendations include measures to tackle disinformation about climate change, greater use of national climate health impact assessments, and explicit recognition of the mental health crisis driven by the climate emergency.
Responding to the report, Dr Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, said: “The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have clearly shown what fossil fuel dependency really means – not just higher bills, but strained or broken health systems, disrupted food and fuel supplies and societies under pressure. The case for acting on climate now is not just environmental. It is a security argument, a health argument and an economic argument, all at once. And it is a moral imperative.” Kluge added: “The decisions taken by governments today will determine the disease burden carried by people who are currently in primary school. I commit to ensuring that climate change is treated as the health emergency it is across the 53 member states of the WHO European region.”
Jakobsdóttir argued that the way to challenge climate scepticism is to personalise the threat: “Climate change is not happening somewhere else, to someone else, in the future. It is shortening lives in European cities right now. It is filling hospitals. It is driving anxiety and stress and other mental health issues. And the policies that would fix it – clean air, active travel, insulated homes, sustainable food – are exactly the policies that make people healthier and happier today. When the health argument and the climate argument are the same argument, it becomes very hard to oppose.”
Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, welcomed the report, stating: “The current state of the planet, where we are breaching multiple planetary boundaries, and which manifests itself as public health threats impacting millions of people across the world, provides ample scientific evidence that climate change should be declared a public health emergency of international concern.”