The 2020 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: responding to converging crises

Translations For the Chinese, French, German, and Spanish translations of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section. For the Chinese, French, German, and Spanish translations of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section. Peter ByassEpidemiologist who specialised in measuring and evaluating population health in Africa and Asia. Born on April 3, 1957, in Bedford, UK, he died from a heart attack on Aug 16, 2020, in Bedfordshire, UK, aged 63 years. Full-Text PDF Department of ErrorWatts N, Amann M, Arnell N, et al. The 2020 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: responding to converging crises. Lancet 2020; published online December 2. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32290-X—In this Review, Figure 3 should have shown the distribution of annual heat-related mortality in the population older than 65 years, not the distribution in all ages. This correction has been made to the online version as of Dec 14, 2020, and will be made to the printed version. Full-Text PDF Countdown on health and climate change: too important for methodological errorsNick Watts and colleagues1 did wide-reaching analyses to track the emerging health effect of climate change. Among other indicators they estimated “Indicator 1.1.3: heat-related mortality” and “Indicator 3.3: premature mortality from ambient air pollution” and concluded: “average heat-related mortality per year…a total of 296 000 deaths in 2018” and “premature deaths…from ambient PM2·5 have increased…from 2·95 million deaths in 2015 to 3·01 million deaths in 2018”. The Article1 estimated numbers of deaths by attributable fractions, which disallows identification of the number of premature deaths due to exposure. Full-Text PDF Countdown on health and climate change: too important for methodological errors – Authors' replyWe thank Peter Morfeld and Thomas Erren for their interest in the 2020 report of the Lancet Countdown.1 They argue that the use of attributable fractions is inadequate to estimate premature mortality from ambient air pollution or exposure to heat, and base their argument on the work by Hammitt and colleagues,2 which states that mortality does not allow one to “distinguish between situations in which a few people die much earlier than they would have if unexposed and situations in which many people die a little earlier than they would have if unexposed”. Full-Text PDF No healthy longevity without a healthy planetThe Lancet Countdown 2020, published on Dec 2, 2020, provides a grim outlook of the impact of climate change, emphasising the severe effects on our health and the resulting overwhelming strain on health-care systems. It reports record-high global temperatures that provide breeding ground for infectious diseases and that jeopardise food security. Because these effects will pose the greatest dangers for vulnerable groups, climate disruptions are widening pre-existing wealth-related and age-related divides. Full-Text PDF Open AccessClimate and COVID-19: converging crisesThe climate crisis is still raging. A year ago, news headlines were dominated by the climate youth movement and a sense of urgency. But COVID-19 has displaced that interest and awareness. In fact, the causes of both crises share commonalities, and their effects are converging. The climate emergency and COVID-19, a zoonotic disease, are both borne of human activity that has led to environmental degradation. Neither the climate emergency nor a zoonotic pandemic were unexpected. Both have led to the preventable loss of lives through actions that are delayed, insufficient, or mistaken. Full-Text PDF