It’s hard to remember, in the midst of a calamitous global pandemic, that people around the globe are healthier now than they were just a few decades ago. We’re smoking less, eating fewer trans fats, dying from cancer less frequently, getting vaccinated more, and living, on average, longer. The planet, however, is getting sicker. A landmark report published Wednesday in the medical journal The Lancet contains a stark warning: “A changing climate threatens to undermine the past 50 years of gains in public health.”

An international team of experts drew on decades of work on climate and health in order to demonstrate that rising temperatures and other consequences of burning fossil fuels are inextricably linked to every facet of human health. They looked at 43 indicators, things like heat, infectious disease, and drought, to track the health effects of the changing climate.

Lancet has produced an updated version of this report, called the “Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change,” every year since 2015. (The previous years it has published have coincidentally been the five hottest on record.) But this year’s report, the authors said, is “the most worrying outlook” they’ve ever published. The Lancet not only took a host of new climate-health risks into account, it also found that “a concerning number of indicators are showing an early, but sustained, reversal of previously positive trends identified in past reports.”

So, are we totally doomed? Let’s take a look at the biggest takeaways.

  • Wildfires are affecting larger areas of land and larger quantities of people
  • Climate change increases the transmission of some infectious diseases
  • Many city dwellers don’t have access to green space
  • Red meat consumption is bad for the planet … and us

Read the full article about climate change and public health gains by Zoya Teirstein at Grist.