Health cost of climate change will climb to $12.5 trillion by 2050

A new report from the World Economic Forum shows that Africa is most vulnerable to health-related losses

By 2050, climate change will probably cause an additional 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in health-related economic losses worldwide, according to a new report out of the World Economic Forum.

The report, released on the second day of the forum’s annual meetings in Davos, endeavours to quantify the consequences of climate change — in terms of both the health outcomes and the economic costs to the healthcare system. To do so, the report’s authors analysed six major climate event categories as important drivers of negative health outcomes: floods, droughts, heatwaves, tropical storms, wildfires and rising sea levels.

According to the report, floods were found to pose the highest acute risk of climate-induced mortality, accounting for a projected 8.5 million deaths by 2050.

South Africans are familiar with just how destructive extreme weather events can be. Over the weekend, KwaZulu-Natal was hit by another bout of flooding, killing 11 people and ravaging infrastructure.

In 2022, the province was hit by the most catastrophic floods on record, which led to 459 fatalities. More than 4 000 homes were destroyed and the estimated infrastructure and business losses reached $2 billion.

Tuesday’s World Economic Forum report notes that climate change will also have more indirect effects on health, triggering “a catastrophic rise” across several climate-sensitive diseases.

It says by 2050, an additional 500 million people may be at risk of exposure to vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and Zika. This is as warmer temperatures increase both the breeding period and geographical range of mosquito colonies, causing these diseases to spread to Europe and the United States. 

Climate change also stands to widen the regional socio-economic divides, with Africa and southern Asia being at a higher risk of negative health outcomes.

The report says Africa will bear the brunt of climate change-related health losses, sustaining a staggering 1.29 billion disability-adjusted life years (a measure of the years of life lost to premature mortality associated to a specific cause as well as the years of healthy life lost to disability or reduced health) by 2050. 

The continent will also incur an economic cost of more than $2 trillion from lost productivity and healthcare costs.