How climate change is making the world sick

Climate change threatens public health, with extreme weather events leading to increased cases of malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea, heat stress, and more. Mosquitoes carrying viruses spread into new regions due to warmer temperatures. Floods and drought lead to contaminated water and spread of cholera. Heat stress is projected to impact hundreds of millions, with wildfires causing air pollution and thousands of deaths. The COP28 talks also aim to protect people from climate-driven health threats.

Heat stress. Lung damage from wildfire smoke. The spread of disease-carrying mosquitoes into new regions as temperatures rise.

These are just a few of the ways that public health has been impacted and compounded by climate change - a focus for the first time ever at the annual U.N. climate summit COP28.

Government ministers are expected to discuss ways they can protect people from climate-driven health threats, which now threaten to undo decades of progress in public health.

From 2030, experts expect that just four of these threats - malnutrition, malaria and dengue, diarrhoea, and heat stress - will push global death tolls up by 250,000 per year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

“Extreme weather events are becoming extreme health events,” said Martin Edlund, CEO of global health nonprofit Malaria No More.

Here’s how climate change is harming people’s health across the world today, and what countries might expect in the future.

Mosquitoes that carry viruses including dengue, malaria, West Nile and Zika are shifting into new parts of the world as warmer temperatures and heavy rains create more hospitable conditions for them to breed.