“CRISIS ON TOP OF A CRISIS”
Last year people worldwide were exposed to an average of 86 days of life-threatening temperatures, according to the Lancet Countdown study. Around 60 per of those days were made more than twice as likely due to climate change, it said.
The number of people over 65 who died from heat rose by 85 per from 1991-2000 to 2013-2022, it added.
“However these impacts that we are seeing today could be just an early symptom of a very dangerous future,” Lancet Countdown’s executive director Marina Romanello told journalists.
Under a scenario in which the world warms by two degrees Celsius by the end of the century – it is currently on track for 2.7 degrees Celsius – annual heat-related deaths were projected to increase 370 per cent by 2050. That marks a 4.7-fold increase.
Around 520 million more people will experience moderate or severe food insecurity by mid-century, according to the projections.
And mosquito-borne infectious diseases will continue to spread into new areas. The transmission of dengue would increase by 36 per cent under a 2 degrees Celsius warming scenario, according to the study.
Meanwhile, more than a quarter of cities surveyed by the researchers said they were worried that climate change would overwhelm their capacity to cope.
“We’re facing a crisis on top of a crisis,” said Lancet Countdown’s Georgiana Gordon-Strachan, whose homeland Jamaica is currently in the middle of a dengue outbreak.
Source: CNA
