Climate Deaths & Health Projections to 2050: Key Facts

The headline figure in the World Economic Forum’s 2024 report, which was created in partnership with Oliver Wyman and based on IPCC climate scenarios projecting 2.5 to 2.9 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, is 14.5 million excess deaths by 2050. Over two billion years of healthy life were also projected to be lost, along with $12.5 trillion in economic losses. These do not represent projections from the modeling envelope’s distant edges. These are mid-range projections based on what would happen if present trends persisted without a significant acceleration of climate action. The larger economic losses from infrastructure and productivity are not included in the $1.1 trillion figure included in that analysis, which represents the additional cost to healthcare systems alone. It’s simply the cost of caring for the sick and the dying.

Because the total number can obscure the precise mechanisms, it is important to carefully examine the breakdown by cause of death. By 2050, floods are expected to be the leading cause of acute mortality, accounting for 8.5 million deaths. With 3.2 million, droughts rank second. These are not abstract climate outcomes; rather, they are the kind of deaths that occur gradually in a field that has ceased to produce food or abruptly in a house that is filling with water. With an estimated $7.1 trillion in lost productivity, heat waves have the highest economic cost of any single category. This is primarily due to the fact that they kill quietly, in the bodies of infants, older adults, and outdoor workers who have nowhere to go when the temperature rises above what their bodies can handle.

The October release of the 2025 Lancet Countdown report, which was created in partnership with the WHO, included an additional level of detail that conflicts with the WEF projections. Since the 1990s, heat-related mortality has already increased by 23%, averaging 546,000 deaths annually. In 2024, the average person worldwide encountered 16 additional days of hazardous heat that would not have happened in the absence of climate change. The exposure was even worse for older adults and infants, with over 20 heatwave days per person, a fourfold increase over the previous 20 years. Heat exposure cost the economy $1.09 trillion in 2024 by preventing 640 billion potential working hours. In 2023, governments spent a total of $956 billion on net fossil fuel subsidies, which is more than three times the yearly sum committed to helping climate-vulnerable countries. Fossil fuel subsidies accounted for 15 countries’ total national health budgets.

These projections are especially difficult to accept because of the inequality they contain. This was made clear in the Climate Impact Lab’s analysis: low- and middle-income nations are predicted to account for over 90% of climate-related deaths. One of the cruelest ironies of climate change, according to Michael Greenstone, co-founder of the Climate Impact Lab and director of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth at the University of Chicago, is that it will kill millions of people, mostly in nations that did the least to cause it. Despite having similar climates, Burkina Faso in West Africa is expected to suffer twice as many heat-related deaths as Kuwait. Wealth is the difference. The ability to maintain hospitals, construct cooling centers, purchase air conditioners, and alert populations ahead of time is not equally distributed. Neither is climate change.

Sitting with these figures, there’s a sense that the discussion surrounding climate change and health hasn’t yet fully taken into account what these kinds of projections actually mean to people. In comparison, the population of Ecuador, Senegal, or Cambodia is about 14.5 million, which is a significant enough number to be challenging to comprehend. WHO Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health Vanessa Kerry put it bluntly: if nothing is done, the death toll will be enormous and decades of progress in global health outcomes will be undone.

Whether international climate finance will advance to the extent these projections indicate is required is still up in the air. The Lancet data and the WEF analysis both make it abundantly evident that doing nothing comes at a cost. The estimated $12.5 trillion in economic losses is not a penalty paid in a vacuum; rather, it is the economic capacity taken away from communities that will also be attempting to rebuild their hospitals and bury their dead. Dr. Marina Romanello of The Lancet provided the counterargument: by 2050, decisive climate action, particularly the phase-out of fossil fuels while improving food systems, could prevent up to 9 million premature deaths annually. Every year, nine million people die. Each year. In both directions, that is the scale of what is on the table.

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