EU has no plan for rising climate-related deaths, scientists warn

Europe is increasingly grappling with illness and deaths from extreme weather and the arrival of tropical diseases but it has no plan to prevent and cope with rising climate-related health problems, experts have warned.

Scientists fear mosquito-borne diseases dengue and chikungunya that were once confined to tropical regions could become endemic in Europe due to the northward spread of tiger mosquitos, which have made it as far as Brussels and 20 other towns in Belgium. 

Meanwhile, heat-related deaths are projected to increase threefold by the end of the century, while deaths caused by extreme events including floods and wild fires are rising.

With temperatures in Europe rising faster than anywhere else and no rapid wind down of lethal burning of fossil fuels in sight, public health leaders are trying to push the crisis to the top of the policy agenda.

Caroline Costongs, director of NGO EuroHealthNet, an alliance of public health authorities and institutes, urged the EU to deliver a climate and health strategy, during and event on Wednesday.

The climate crisis is a "cross-border threat to public health," she said, calling for an EU strategy tying climate and health policies together. "This includes climate crisis preparedness, improving living environments, housing, transport, food, greening health systems, and climate justice.”

Research into the climate crisis' deadly threat to human health is underway but it's not enough, Costongs, told the audience at one of the NGO's flagship events. The European Commission's latest plan to fund new research to mitigate climate threats to health is “very important for the data, but not for the action,” Costongs said.

The NGO wants to see climate and health priorities embedded across all EU policies, including the Commission’s forthcoming Affordable Housing Plan and Anti-Poverty Strategy, Costongs said.

The event, hosted by Spain, featured high-profile speakers from the European Commission and national health authorities, who outlined their departments’ efforts to tackle what a top Spanish health official said was the “biggest 21st century health threat that we have.”

There's no shortage of committees and plans devoted to climate and health, said Dirk Ramaekers, board chair of Belgium's public health service. But there was still a "collective blindness" to the scale of the crisis, he warned: "It will take a major socio-economic system change to curb what we’re seeing now."

Heat, hunger and pestilence

Climate change is already having dramatic effects on human health through heat and food insecurity, according to Joacim Rocklöv, regional co-director for Europe at The Lancet Countdown on Climate Change & Health.

Nearly 60 million people suffered from serious food insecurity in Europe in 2021, with 11.9 million of these cases attributable to climate change, he said. Heat itself is also a killer, with heat-attributable mortality up sharply between 2013 and 2022 compared to the previous decade.

With higher temperatures also come new diseases. Dengue has already caused havoc in southern Europe in recent years, with Italy, France and Spain experiencing regular outbreaks. Last year marked a new peak for the disease, with 304 cases reported across the EU — compared to 275 in the previous 15 years.

According to a study in The Lancet Planetary Heath journal, the spread of dengue and chikungunya could increase to five times the current rate by 2060 under worst-case climate scenarios.

EU-backed research for a vaccine to counter these threats is bearing some fruit, but the rollout has been far from smooth. The chikungunya vaccine made by French manufacturer Valneva has been paused for over-65s while the European Medicines Agency investigates 17 serious adverse events, including two deaths.

Meanwhile in Iceland, the World Health Organization convened an expert panel on Wednesday to come up with recommendations for governments on how to mitigate the health harms from the climate crisis.

“Ultimately, our hope is that our work will inform high-level decision-makers across the European region because the health of our planet is inseparable from the health of our people,” Katrín Jakobsdóttir, former Icelandic prime minister and chair of the commission, told reporters. The panel will report back to WHO countries in May 2026.