Before It Kills the Planet, Climate Change Is Killing You Softly

The farmer in Borno State woke up one morning and found his field underwater. Again. The season before, it was the drought that took everything. He had stopped counting the number of harvests that did not come. What he could not stop counting was the number of children going to bed hungry at night in his household, and the knot in his chest that had not loosened in two years. His doctor, the one he visited at the government clinic 40 kilometres away, had no name for what he was experiencing. But researchers at University College London have a term for it. They call it solastalgia, the grief that comes from watching your environment slowly die while you are still living in it.

This farmer’s story is not a drought story. It is not a flood story. It is a climate story, and it is being lived right now by hundreds of millions of people across the world, most of them in countries like Nigeria, that emitted the least but are suffering the most.

Climate change is not a future threat. It is a present murder. It is just killing people slowly enough that most governments have not called it what it is.

The Numbers That Must Never Be Buried in a Press Release

The evidence is in, and it is crushing.

The 2025 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, produced in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, found that 12 of 20 key indicators tracking health threats have reached record levels. The rate of heat-related mortality has increased by 23 per cent since the 1990s, pushing total heat-related deaths to an average of 546,000 deaths per year.

That is more than half a million people dying every year from heat. Not from war. Not from famine. From warmth that humanity manufactured.

Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone. The direct damage costs to health, excluding costs in agriculture and water and sanitation, is estimated to be between US$2 to 4 billion per year by 2030.

And if the world continues on its current path, climate-related health impacts could drive an extra 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in economic losses by 2050, according to a World Economic Forum report. Healthcare systems alone are predicted to face an additional $1.1 trillion burden.

These are not projections from alarmists. They come from the same institutions that told us COVID-19 would overwhelm hospitals before it did. The difference is that there is no vaccine for a warming planet.

The year 2024 remains the hottest in recorded history, with an average global surface temperature 1.60 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the first calendar year ever to exceed the critical 1.5 degree Paris Agreement threshold. The three-year global temperature average for 2023 to 2025 now exceeds 1.5 degrees for the first time in recorded human history, according to both the World Meteorological Organisation and Copernicus.

The planet has crossed the line the world agreed it must not cross. And it has done so quietly, without sirens.

How Heat Breaks the Human Body Apart

Most people understand heat as discomfort. Scientists understand it as a slow physiological assault.

The human body has limited mechanisms to cope with excessive heat, including evaporation by sweating, conduction, convection, and radiation, which can be impaired in high-humidity conditions. Adaptation to heat exposure declines with age, comorbidities, and prescription medications. Reports of heat-related emergency hospital admissions continue to rise, especially when there are extreme heat events.

But heat does not only kill through heatstroke. It is far more creative in how it destroys the body.

A recent multinational meta-analysis study showed that a one degree Celsius increase in ambient temperature increased the risk of renal failure by 1.1 per cent and mortality from renal failure, urolithiasis, and urinary tract infection by 3.1 per cent. High temperatures are also significantly associated with increased rates of aggressive behaviour, suicide, and substance use, with an increased risk of mortality during heat waves.

A significant concern is that higher ambient temperatures during pregnancy are associated with adverse outcomes, including preterm birth and low birthweight. Babies born into a warming world are arriving at risk before they have even taken their first breath.

The average person was exposed to 16 days of dangerous heat in 2024 that would not have been expected without climate change, with infants and older adults facing a total of over 20 heatwave days per person, a fourfold increase over the last 20 years.

Temperature rise and extreme heat are already straining the renal and cardiovascular systems of millions of people, contributing to a global loss of $1.09 trillion in labour capacity in 2024 alone. The costs of heat-related deaths among older adults reached $261 billion.

This is what a slow kill looks like on a spreadsheet. Beneath those numbers are grandmothers who did not survive the dry season, workers who collapsed in fields at noon, and babies in underfunded clinics whose kidneys were fighting a battle nobody warned their parents about.

The Disease Multiplier Nobody Talks About Enough

Climate change does not just create new ways to die. It supercharges the old ones.

In 2020, the WHO reported that vector-borne diseases accounted for more than 17 per cent of all infectious diseases, resulting in more than 700,000 annual deaths worldwide. Without preventive actions, deaths from such diseases may rise further as temperatures and rainfall patterns shift.

The global average transmission potential of dengue has risen by up to 49 per cent since the 1950s, as warmer temperatures expand the territory where the Aedes mosquito can survive and breed. Dengue, once a disease of the tropics, is appearing in Europe. Malaria, once retreating under public health campaigns, is expanding its range into highland areas that were previously too cold to sustain the Anopheles mosquito.

Malaria resulted in more than 400,000 deaths annually, with most of those deaths occurring in children under the age of five years. Climate change is working every day to make that number worse.

WHO data indicates 2 billion people lack safe drinking water, and 600 million suffer from foodborne illnesses annually, with children under five bearing 30 per cent of foodborne fatalities. Climate stressors heighten waterborne and foodborne disease risks at every stage of the chain.

The fires add another layer. The year 2024 saw a record-high 154,000 estimated deaths from wildfire smoke-derived small particulate matter air pollution. Simultaneously, an estimated 2.52 million people died from fossil fuel-derived outdoor air pollution in 2022 alone, while an estimated 2.3 million deaths came from dirty fuel-derived household air pollution in the same year.

The global cost of health damages associated with exposure to air pollution is estimated at US$8.1 trillion a year, equivalent to 6.1 per cent of global GDP. In households, smoke from cooking with polluting fuels like wood, kerosene or coal is linked to more than 3 million premature deaths a year.

That last figure describes most of rural Nigeria. The wood-fire in the kitchen. The kerosene lamp in the bedroom. The smoke that settles in the lungs of children who have never heard the phrase climate change but are already living its most violent chapter.

Nigeria: The Country Paying the Highest Bill It Did Not Run

Nigeria is in the top 25 highest greenhouse gas emitters, but contributes just 0.8 per cent of global total emissions. Emissions per person per year are less than two tonnes, compared to the global average of over six tonnes.

Nigeria is, in the language of climate justice, a victim of other people’s excesses. And the consequences are arriving with a cruelty that defies the arithmetic.

A staggering 33 million people face acute food insecurity in Nigeria in 2025, with the number of people facing emergency levels of need projected to almost double during the lean season from June to August. This represents an alarming rise of seven million people from the same period the previous year, driven by economic hardship coupled with record-high inflation, the effects of climate change, and persistent violence in the northeastern states.

From October 1 to 15 of 2024 alone, FAO recorded that floods affected over 9.2 million people and submerged 4.5 million hectares of land, including approximately 1.6 million hectares of farmland. The potential annual production losses for maize, sorghum and rice combined in the flooded areas could amount to about 1.1 million tonnes, enough to feed 13 million people for a year. In financial terms, potential cereal crop losses amount to almost USD 1 billion.

The prevalence of moderate and severe food insecurity combined in Nigeria in 2021 was 69.7 per cent, according to the World Bank. In Borno State’s Jere Local Government Area, nine out of every ten households experienced food insecurity in 2023. Over 1.3 million children under five faced the threat of malnutrition in North East Nigeria in 2022.

The Nigerian Meteorological Service issued warnings about rising temperatures, especially in the North, which are leading to an increase in hospital admissions for elderly patients, neonates, and children due to heatstroke, cardiovascular, respiratory, and cerebrovascular illnesses. Northern Nigeria is experiencing greater heatwaves and lengthier, more erratic rainfall, while temperatures in northeastern interior lowlands sometimes rise as high as 44 degrees Celsius before the onset of rains.

Forty-four degrees Celsius. In communities where most people have no electricity and no cooling. This is not discomfort. This is physiological danger sitting on top of poverty.

The agricultural sector employs over 70 per cent of Nigeria’s workforce and accounts for about 24 per cent of GDP. It is predominantly rain-fed, meaning any disruption in rainfall patterns directly impacts crop yields and food production. The IPCC projects Nigeria will experience an increase in average temperatures by 1.5 to 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, significantly affecting agricultural productivity.

Food inflation in Nigeria exceeded 34 per cent as of May 2024. According to the World Bank, this rising inflation caused the number of impoverished Nigerians to rise from 89.8 million at the beginning of 2023 to a staggering 104 million in 2024.

That jump, from 89.8 million to 104 million poor Nigerians in one year, is not solely an economic crisis. Climate change is a thread running through it. Floods destroyed farmland. Droughts killed harvests. Displaced herders clashed with settled farmers. Food prices rose. The poor got poorer. The vulnerable became unreachable.

The Wound Nobody Sees: Climate Change and the Breaking Mind

It is easier to count dead bodies than to count broken spirits. But the mental health toll of climate change is real, documented, and growing faster than most governments are willing to acknowledge.

Recent estimates suggest that persistent and heightened levels of climate anxiety negatively impact daily life function in 21 to 27 per cent of adults and 38 to 45 per cent of children and young adults. Globally, a total of 605 extreme weather events were recorded in 2024, displacing about 824,500 people.

Around two-thirds, or 66 per cent, of young Nigerians experience eco-anxiety, while over 45 per cent need access to mental health support, according to 2022 research by The Eco-Anxiety Africa Project. As this organisation expanded its research and youth-led dialogues across the continent, it became clear that young people in regions facing climate events, political instability and electricity poverty are grappling with anxiety, as well as grief, anger, PTSD and, in some cases, suicidal ideation.

Two-thirds. Of Nigerian youth. Walking around every day carrying fear for the earth they inherited and did not damage.

Research across 11 African countries confirms that the climate crisis, both in terms of immediate climate impacts such as natural disasters and slower or more indirect effects such as rising temperatures, increases symptoms of depression, anxiety, PTSD and incidents of suicide. Vulnerable groups include farmers, young people, women, migrants and survivors of climate disasters.

Nigerian participants in rural farming households reported that heat stress, malaria, depression, hunger and death are common impacts of the climate crisis on their health. Nigerian respondents, along with young people from India, Brazil and the Philippines, were most likely to report being ignored or dismissed when they tried to talk about climate change.

That last sentence deserves to be read again. The people suffering the most from climate change are also the ones least likely to be listened to when they speak about it. The science has a name for this injustice too. It is called climate silence, and it is compounding the mental health crisis in communities that already have the fewest resources for treatment.

In Nigeria, solastalgia is observed in communities affected by desertification, especially in the North. For generations, these communities depended on stable land for grazing and cultural identity. The progressive advance of the Sahara, deforestation and declining rainfall have transformed fertile lands into unproductive terrain. Residents now experience profound distress, grief and emotional displacement watching a place once called home no longer provide the same comfort. Such emotional consequences are particularly acute among indigenous populations, farmers, and others whose identities and livelihoods are tightly linked to the ecosystem.

Unless urgent action is taken, Africa risks raising a damaged generation, psychologically scarred by the impacts of the climate crisis. Integrating psychosocial care into disaster response, as well as fostering community resilience through culturally-sensitive awareness initiatives, can help build coping skills to strengthen young minds against climate threats.

A damaged generation. That phrase should land in the conscience of every policy maker in Abuja, Lagos, and every state capital in between.

The Inequality That Makes It All Worse

Despite contributing minimally to global emissions, low-income countries and small island developing states endure the harshest health impacts. In vulnerable regions, the death rate from extreme weather events in the last decade was 15 times higher than in less vulnerable ones.

Fifteen times higher. Not 15 per cent higher. Fifteen times.

Areas with weak health infrastructure, mostly in developing countries, will be the least able to cope without assistance to prepare and respond. Research shows that 3.6 billion people already live in areas highly susceptible to climate change.

Governments spent US$956 billion on net fossil fuel subsidies in 2023, more than triple the annual amount pledged to support climate-vulnerable countries.

That comparison is the most damning fact in this entire report. The world spent almost a trillion dollars last year subsidising the fuels that are causing the deaths, and offered less than a third of that to the countries bearing the consequences. This is not an oversight. This is policy. And it has a body count.

The Global Moment and Why It Cannot Wait

The 2025 Lancet Countdown report, produced in collaboration with WHO and 71 academic institutions worldwide, found that heat exposure caused 640 billion potential labour hours to be lost in 2024, with productivity losses equivalent to US$1.09 trillion.

An estimated 160,000 premature deaths were avoided every year between 2010 and 2022 from reduced coal-derived outdoor air pollution alone, proving that climate action saves lives in real time. Renewable energy generation reached a record 12 per cent of global electricity, creating 16 million jobs worldwide.

The solutions exist. The science is not in dispute. What is lacking is the political urgency that matches the scale of the emergency.

As the world prepares for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, WHO’s Assistant Director-General Dr Jeremy Farrar put it plainly, “The climate crisis is a health crisis. Every fraction of a degree of warming costs lives and livelihoods. Climate inaction is killing people now in all countries.”

Every fraction. That is not poetry. That is a calibration of how precisely the world’s indifference translates into graves.

What Nigeria Must Do Before the Next Flood Season

The Federal Government must treat climate change as the public health emergency it already is, not a future projection. The Ministry of Health must immediately integrate climate-health impact data into national health planning. State governments, particularly in Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, and other frontline states, must build climate-resilient primary healthcare facilities that can function during flooding and extreme heat. Mental health services must be embedded into every disaster response framework, because the psychological toll of climate events is a health emergency as real as a cholera outbreak. Agricultural investment must pivot urgently toward climate-smart farming techniques, drought-resistant varieties, expanded irrigation, and storage systems that protect the harvest even when the weather turns.

Nigeria contributes less than one per cent of global emissions, but it cannot use that fact as an excuse for inaction at home. Its people are already paying the price. The only question is whether its leaders will show up in time.

The Farmer in Borno Has Already Lost One Season Too Many

He is not waiting for COP30. He is not waiting for a climate fund to be disbursed. He is planting what seed he has left, watching the sky with eyes that have learned not to trust it, and hoping that this season the rain comes in the right month, in the right amount, and does not take his field when it leaves.

His story is the most important climate report in the world. It is happening right now. And it is not being told often enough, loudly enough, or with enough urgency.

Before climate change kills the planet, it is quietly killing him. And millions of others like him, across a continent that did not cause this crisis but is bearing its fullest weight.