Days before climate negotiators gather in Antalya, the World Health Organization has tried to reframe the debate around a single number. Its new report estimates that six proven, relatively low-tech interventions, if rolled out worldwide, would prevent about 1.6 million deaths every year, roughly one death in forty.
The proposals are strikingly ordinary. They include alerts that warn communities before dangerous heat arrives, drinking-water supplies built to cope with a harsher climate, basic sanitation, places to wash hands, cleaner fuels and appliances for cooking and heating at home, and fossil fuel prices that reflect the harm burning them does to people’s lungs.
That final item carries most of the weight. Scrapping wasteful subsidies and taxing coal, oil and gas properly would, by the WHO’s modelling, avert around 1.2 million deaths a year, chiefly through cleaner air. Heat alerts look like the best bargain: because they piggyback on existing services, every dollar spent is projected to return 835. Taking five of the actions together, the average payoff is put at 24 dollars per dollar invested.
The headline economics are large too. The agency counts 3.9 trillion dollars a year in economic welfare gains, another 5.4 trillion flowing into public budgets, and carbon savings equal to almost a third of today’s annual greenhouse emissions outside land use. Poorer countries would gain the most. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the warming planet a medical emergency as much as an environmental one and said most of the harm is avoidable with tools that already exist.
The authors concede that their scale-up scenarios, which run to 2075, are aspirational and that long-range projections are uncertain. COP31 opens in Türkiye on 9 November.
