Climate change is impacting Europe’s pollen season and aggravating people’s hay fever — one of the many health consequences of a heating planet detailed in a major study published Wednesday.
An earlier pollen season — which in the past decade has begun one-to-two weeks ahead of the 1991–2001 period — combined with higher pollen concentrations are exacerbating symptoms such as itchy eyes and throats, sinusitis and wheezy chests, increasing the risk of asthma attacks.
Worsening hay fever is just one in a series of escalating climate-related threats to human health identified by climate scientists in the annual Lancet Countdown report published Wednesday.
Earlier pollen seasons are “a warning sign” that climate change is already affecting our day-to-day lives, José Chen, a research fellow for Lancet Countdown Europe, told POLITICO.
“But this is just the tip of the iceberg: The same forces driving this shift are intensifying heat, spreading infectious diseases, and undermining food security, with profound consequences for our health,” Chen said.
The report, compiled by 63 leading climate scientists, tracks the harmful effects of climate change on human health as well as the responses of European policymakers. Their verdict: Climate change hurts the most vulnerable people in Europe while engagement by policymakers has stagnated.
Growing killer
The report found that heat-related deaths are rising in almost every part of Europe, with extreme heatwaves becoming increasingly frequent and severe. Extreme heat killed 62,000 people in 2024 alone.
Heat and drought also impact farming and drive up food prices. An extra 1 million people in Europe experienced food insecurity in 2023 compared to the 1981–2010 baseline.
The rising prices of fresh fruit and vegetables thanks to climate shocks are likely to translate into unhealthier populations that are more vulnerable to malnourishment and disease, Lancet Countdown co-author Shouro Dasgupta told POLITICO.
“Europe is supposed to be self-sufficient … [but] food insecurity is a real problem in Europe, even in some of the high-income countries,” Dasgupta said.
Malnourishment and the lack of access to a balanced diet makes people more susceptible to health problems, Dasgupta explained. They could also contribute to low birth rates in a region with an aging population.
Climate change also helps spread disease, with mosquito-borne viruses taking root in rapidly heating regions, especially in Southern Europe. The average risk for dengue outbreaks increased by 297 percent across Europe during from 2015–2024 compared to the period from 1981–2010, with similar trends seen for chikungunya and the zika virus.
Need for leadership
Despite these cascading health threats, governments have poured more money into the fossil fuels that drive global heating. European governments spent $444 billion on subsidies in 2023 alone, three times higher than 2016 — a “depressing” state of affairs, Jan Semenza, another of the report’s co-authors, told POLITICO. “We are shooting ourselves in the foot by subsidizing the fossil fuel industry,” he said.
Despite the mounting evidence of the climate threat to health, researchers warn that engagement with the topic is declining across politics, media and society.
The report found that European lawmakers seldom mention the link between climate change and health. In 2024, only 21 of 4,477 speeches in the European Parliament referenced the intersection, far lower than in 2023 (66 mentions) and 2021 (91 mentions).
“We need renewed leadership in Europe to secure a healthy future. This leadership needs to come from individual, political, corporate and media engagement,” Joacim Rocklöv, co-director of the Lancet Countdown Europe and professor at the University of Heidelberg, told journalists in a briefing.
There is some good news. Europe increased its share of renewable energy from 8.4 percent in 2016 to 21.5 percent in 2023, while governments scaled their investments in clean energy and adopted health adaptation plans.
Researchers also note that air pollution from major sectors such as power and transport is declining, which is lowering the deaths due to that cause.
But governments still need to do more and to move faster, Rocklöv said. “Across Europe, the health impacts of climate change are intensifying faster than our response is keeping up.”
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