The Lancet Countdown 2018: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change

The Lancet is the world's leading independent general medical journal. The journal's coverage is international in focus and extends to all aspects of human health. The Lancet publishes the original primary research and review articles of the highest standard. 

The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change is an international, multi-disciplinary research collaboration between academic institutions following on from the 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change, which emphasised that the response to climate change could be “the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century”.

The Lancet Countdown was established to provide an independent, global monitoring system dedicated to tracking the health dimensions of the impacts of, and the response to, climate change. The Lancet Countdown tracks 41 indicators across five domains: climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerability; adaptation, planning, and resilience for health; mitigation actions and health co-benefits; finance and economics; and public and political engagement.

The key messages from the Lancet Countdown’s 2018 report are:

1.   Present day changes in heat waves, labour capacity, vector-borne disease, and food security provide early warning of the compounded and overwhelming impact on public health that are expected if temperatures continue to rise. Trends in climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerabilities show an unacceptably high level of risk for the current and future health of populations across the world.

2.   A lack of progress in reducing emissions and building adaptive capacity threatens both human lives and the viability of the national health systems they depend on, with the potential to disrupt core public health infrastructure and overwhelm health services.

3.   Despite these delays, a number of sectors have seen the beginning of a low-carbon transition, and it is clear that the nature and scale of the response to climate change will be the determining factor in shaping the health of nations for centuries to come.

4.   4 Ensuring a widespread understanding of climate change as a central public health issue will be crucial in delivering an accelerated response, with the health profession beginning to rise to this challenge.

Climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerability

Vulnerability to extremes of heat has steadily risen since 1990 in every region, with 157 million more people exposed to heatwave events in 2017, compared with 2000, and with the average person experiencing an additional 1·4 days of heatwaves per year over the same period. For national economies and household budgets, 153 billion hours of labour were lost in 2017 because of heat, an increase of more than 62 billion hours (3·2 billion weeks of work) since 2000. The direct effects of climate change extend beyond heat to include extremes of weather. In 2017, a total of 712 extreme weather events resulted in US$326 billion in economic losses, almost triple the total losses of 2016.

With regard to India, the report makes the following points:

·      From 2014-2017, the average length of heatwaves in India ranged from 3-4 days compared to the global average of 0.8-1.8 days, and Indians were exposed to almost 60 million heatwave exposure events in 2016, a jump of about 40 million from 2012.

·      The number of hours of labour lost jumped between 2000-2017 across India. For the agriculture sector alone, this rose to about 60,000 million hours in 2017, from about 40,000 million hours in 2000. Overall, across sectors India lost almost 75,000 million hours of labour in 2017, from about 43,000 million hours in 2000. The agriculture sector was more vulnerable compared to the industrial and service sectors because workers there were more likely to be exposed to heat.