The impacts of climate change on human health are often underestimated or perceived to be in a distant future. Here, we present the projected impacts of climate change in the context of COVID-19, a recent human health catastrophe. We compared projected heat mortality with COVID-19 deaths in 38 cities worldwide and found that in half of these cities, heat-related deaths could exceed annual COVID-19 deaths in less than ten years (at + 3.0 °C increase in global warming relative to preindustrial). In seven of these cities, heat mortality could exceed COVID-19 deaths in less than five years. Our results underscore the crucial need for climate action and for the integration of climate change into public health discourse and policy.

Biological Sciences Division Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Richland WA USA

Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention National Institute of Environmental Health Beijing China

CIBERESP Madrid Spain

Climate Air Quality Research Unit School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine Monash University Melbourne Australia

Climate and Environmental Physics Physics Institute University of Bern Bern Switzerland

Climate Research Foundation Madrid Spain

Department of Environmental Systems Science Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science ETH Zurich Zurich Switzerland

Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine Monash University Melbourne Australia

Department of Epidemiology Instituto Nacional de Saúde Dr Ricardo Jorge Lisbon Portugal

Department of Global Health Policy Graduate School of Medicine The University of Tokyo Tokyo Japan

Department of Public Health Environments and Society London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine London UK

Department of Statistics Computer Science and Applications G Parenti University of Florence Florence Italy

Environment and Health Modelling Lab Department of Public Health Environments and Society London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine London UK

Environmental Health Science and Research Bureau Health Canada Ottawa Canada

Faculty of Environmental Sciences Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Czech Republic

Faculty of Medicine School of Epidemiology and Public Health University of Ottawa Ottawa Canada

Institut Pierre Simon Laplace CNRS Paris France

Institute of Atmospheric Physics Czech Academy of Sciences Prague Czech Republic

Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine University of Bern Bern Switzerland

Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research University of Bern Bern Switzerland

School of Health Policy and Management College of Health Sciences Korea University Seoul 02841 Republic of Korea

School of Public Health and Social Work Queensland University of Technology Brisbane Australia

School of the Environment Yale University New Haven CT USA

Zobrazit více v PubMed

Batibeniz, F., Hauser, M. & Seneviratne, S. I. Countries most exposed to individual and concurrent extremes and near-permanent extreme conditions at different global warming levels. Earth Syst. Dyn.14, 485–505 (2023).

Seneviratne, S. I. et al. Weather and climate extreme events in a changing climate. In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds. Masson-Delmotte, V. et al.) 1513–1766 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). 10.1017/9781009157896.013.

Vicedo-Cabrera, A. M. et al. Temperature-related mortality impacts under and beyond Paris Agreement climate change scenarios. Clim. Change150, 391–402 (2018). PubMed PMC

Vicedo-Cabrera, A. M. et al. The burden of heat-related mortality attributable to recent human-induced climate change. Nat. Clim. Change11, 492–500 (2021). PubMed PMC

Gasparrini, A. et al. Projections of temperature-related excess mortality under climate change scenarios. Lancet Planet. Health1, e360–e367 (2017). PubMed PMC

Lüthi, S. et al. Rapid increase in the risk of heat-related mortality. Nat. Commun.14, 4894 (2023). PubMed PMC

Dong, E. et al. The Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering COVID-19 dashboard: Data collection process, challenges faced, and lessons learned. Lancet Infect. Dis.22, e370. 10.1016/S1473-3099(22)00434-0 (2022). PubMed PMC

Dong, E., Du, H. & Gardner, L. An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time. Lancet Infect. Dis.20, 533–534 (2020). PubMed PMC

World Development Indicators: (1) United Nations Population Division. World Population Prospects: 2022 Revision. (2) Census reports and other statistical publications from national statistical offices, (3) Eurostat: Demographic Statistics, (4) United Nations Statistical Division. Population and Vital Statistics Reprot (various years), (5) U.S. Census Bureau: International Database, and (6) Secretariat of the Pacific Community: Statistics and Demography Programme.

Batibeniz, F. et al. Doubling of U.S. population exposure to climate extremes by 2050. Earth’s Future8, e2019EF001421 (2020).

Perkins-Kirkpatrick, S. et al. Extreme terrestrial heat in 2023. Nat. Rev. Earth Environ.5, 244–246 (2024).

Erin Douglas and Alejandra Martinez. “I don’t wish this on anyone”: Two families mourn their losses after a record year for Texas heat deaths (2024); https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/12/texas-heat-deaths-2023-record-climate-change/.

Vicedo-Cabrera, A. M. et al. The footprint of human-induced climate change on heat-related deaths in the summer of 2022 in Switzerland. Environ. Res. Lett.18, 074037 (2023). PubMed PMC

Waidelich, P., Batibeniz, F., Rising, J., Kikstra, J. S. & Seneviratne, S. I. Climate damage projections beyond annual temperature. Nat. Clim. Change10.1038/s41558-024-01990-8 (2024). PubMed PMC

Ebi, K. L. et al. Hot weather and heat extremes: Health risks. The Lancet398, 698–708 (2021). PubMed

Gosling, S. N. et al. Adaptation to climate change: A comparative analysis of modeling methods for heat-related mortality. Environ. Health Perspect.125, 087008 (2017). PubMed PMC

Cuadros, D. F., Branscum, A. J., Mukandavire, Z., Miller, F. D. & MacKinnon, N. Dynamics of the COVID-19 epidemic in urban and rural areas in the United States. Ann. Epidemiol.59, 16–20 (2021). PubMed PMC

Lo, Y. T. E., Mitchell, D. M. & Gasparrini, A. Compound mortality impacts from extreme temperatures and the COVID-19 pandemic. Nat. Commun.15, 4289 (2024). PubMed PMC

Jones, B. & O’Neill, B. C. Spatially explicit global population scenarios consistent with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Environ. Res. Lett.11, 084003 (2016).

Jones, B. & O’Neill, B. C. Global one-eighth degree population base year and projection grids based on the shared socioeconomic pathways, Revision 01. (2020).

Seneviratne, S. I., Donat, M. G., Pitman, A. J., Knutti, R. & Wilby, R. L. Allowable CO2 emissions based on regional and impact-related climate targets. Nature529, 477–483 (2016). PubMed

Seneviratne, S. I. & Hauser, M. Regional climate sensitivity of climate extremes in CMIP6 versus CMIP5 multimodel ensembles. Earth’s Future8, e2019EF001474 (2020). PubMed PMC

Wartenburger, R. et al. Changes in regional climate extremes as a function of global mean temperature: An interactive plotting framework. Geosci. Model Dev.10, 3609–3634 (2017).

Rajczak, J., Kotlarski, S., Salzmann, N. & Schär, C. Robust climate scenarios for sites with sparse observations: A two-step bias correction approach. Int. J. Climatol.36, 1226–1243 (2016).

Vicedo-Cabrera, A. M., Sera, F. & Gasparrini, A. Hands-on tutorial on a modeling framework for projections of climate change impacts on health. Epidemiology30, 321–329 (2019). PubMed PMC

Gasparrini, A. Modeling exposure–lag–response associations with distributed lag non-linear models. Stat. Med.33, 881–899 (2014). PubMed PMC

Gasparrini, A. et al. Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: A multicountry observational study. Lancet386, 369–375 (2015). PubMed PMC

Armstrong, B. et al. The role of humidity in associations of high temperature with mortality: A multicountry, multicity study. Environ. Health Perspect.127, 097007 (2019). PubMed PMC

Guo, Y. et al. Heat wave and mortality: A multicountry, multicommunity study. Environ. Health Perspect.125, 087006 (2017). PubMed PMC

Xu, Z., Cheng, J., Hu, W. & Tong, S. Heatwave and health events: A systematic evaluation of different temperature indicators, heatwave intensities and durations. Sci. Total Environ.630, 679–689 (2018). PubMed

Gasparrini, A. & Leone, M. Attributable risk from distributed lag models. BMC Med. Res. Methodol.14, 55 (2014). PubMed PMC

De Schrijver, E. et al. A comparative analysis of the temperature-mortality risks using different weather datasets across heterogeneous regions. GeoHealth5, e2020GH000363 (2021). PubMed PMC

Gasparrini, A., Armstrong, B. & Kenward, M. G. Distributed lag non-linear models. Stat. Med.29, 2224–2234 (2010). PubMed PMC

Sera, F., Armstrong, B., Blangiardo, M. & Gasparrini, A. An extended mixed-effects framework for meta-analysis. Stat. Med.38, 5429–5444 (2019). PubMed

Kottek, M., Grieser, J., Beck, C., Rudolf, B. & Rubel, F. World Map of the Köppen–Geiger climate classification updated. metz15, 259–263 (2006).

Gasparrini, A. Distributed lag linear and non-linear models in R : The package dlnm. J. Stat. Soft.43, 1 (2011). PubMed PMC

Marani, M., Katul, G. G., Pan, W. K. & Parolari, A. J. Intensity and frequency of extreme novel epidemics. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.118, e2105482118 (2021). PubMed PMC

Brunner, L., Hauser, M., Lorenz, R. & Beyerle, U. The ETH Zurich CMIP6 next generation archive: Technical documentation (2020). 10.5281/ZENODO.3734128.