Bhopal, A., Rao, S., Jouhaud, R., Cabieses, B., Wickramage, K., Bojorquez, I., Spiegel, P., Abubaker, I., Blanchet, K., & Kumar, B. N. (2025). Climate change, migration, displacement, and health: past, present, and future. The Lancet, 407(10524), 114–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(25)02587-5
Abstract:
The history of human health and migration, the human story, is deeply intertwined with the natural environment. As described by Anthony McMichael, pioneering scholar of health and environmental change, the climate is not merely a backdrop to human life, it is embedded in who we are and how we live. Modern human civilisation has been facilitated by the remarkably stable climatic conditions of the Holocene: the past 11 000 years during which century-to-century global average temperatures varied by no more than 1°C. Nowadays, most human settlements are concentrated in a relatively narrow band of climatic conditions ideally suited to human physiology and food production, described as the “human climate niche”. This stable period has ended abruptly, as we enter a new epoch defined by human intervention on earth systems: the Anthropocene. Global temperatures are already 1·3°C above pre-industrial measures and are projected to rise by 2·7°C or more by 2100. Consequently, billions of people are being exposed to temperatures far outside the historic human climate niche, with cascading negative effects on health, migration, and displacement.