"That health and climate change are interwoven is widely accepted, with extensive evidence of their interactions. For the past 5 years, the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change has monitored and reported more than 40 global indicators that measure the impact of our changing climate on health. The newly published 2020 report includes novel indicators on heat-related mortality, migration and population displacement, urban green spaces, low-carbon diets, and the economic costs of labour capacity loss due to extreme heat. The breadth of the indicators has deepened scientific understanding of how climate affects health and puts stress on health systems. This is manifested in, for example, the health effects of air pollution leading to asthma, challenges to global food security and reduced crop yield potentially leading to poor diets, limited access to green space increasing risk factors for mental health conditions, and vulnerability to heat in people older than 65 years. Treating these resultant health conditions effectively depends on health systems' capacity, which is in turn dependent on the resilience of health services that are increasingly stretched in response to the two crises."
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