Climate change is already shaping our well-being. It affects mental health, spreads infectious diseases, disrupts work, damages food supplies and forces families to go away their homes attributable to conflict, hunger or flooding.
Well-being refers to all the things that permits people to live healthy, protected and meaningful lives. This includes physical and mental health, access to food, clean water, hygiene and income, in addition to work, leisure, culture and education.
This includes personal safety, independence, trust in institutions and the way people feel about their lives. Environmental quality, biodiversity and the degree of inequality in society are also a part of well-being. Climate change affects each of those areas.
Our new studyco-authored with René Klejn of Leiden University, examines the various ways climate change affects well-being and assesses whether these effects are reflected within the climate policy models that guide global decision-making.
These models are large computer simulations that explore how society and the economy might change under different climate and policy scenarios. Policymakers use them to check “what-if” questions, similar to introducing a carbon price or expanding renewable energy, before making actual decisions.
We found that although researchers have documented a wide selection of climate-related harms, only a few of those aspects appear in essentially the most influential models utilized by governments and international agencies. New empirical models include well-being, but they aren't those shaping today's climate policies.
This distinction matters because climate policy models affect real-world decisions. For example, the modeling of the International Energy Agency is informed Energy investment. Models utilized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN's scientific advisory body, have generated global interest. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, sometimes on the expense of rapid emissions reductions.
If fitness shouldn't be represented, the advantages of climate motion can be reduced since the models cannot account for them.
Research over 100 institutions The Lancet Countdown – A significant global annual review of how climate change is already affecting human health shows that heat is now answerable for 550,000 deaths every year. This is 63% higher than within the Nineties. Four out of 5 heat wave days today don't occur without climate change.
Rising temperatures are changing the character of labor. In 2024In sectors similar to agriculture and construction, 640 billion potential work hours were lost because conditions were too hot to work safely. This represents greater than US$1 trillion ($755,725,000) in lost revenue.
Global food systems are also threatened by heat and drought. According to Lancet countdown estimatesIf the planet warms by 2°C, about 500 million more people could face food insecurity inside the subsequent twenty years.
If warming reaches 3.6°C by the tip of the century, that number could rise to 1.1 billion. These estimates don't yet include the consequences of sea level rise, damaged infrastructure, agricultural pests or reduced crop nutrients.
Any of those effects—heat deaths, lost work hours, or increased food insecurity—are systematically included in the main climate policy models used today. This signifies that decisions about climate motion may ignore a few of an important human consequences.
Failure to cut back emissions has costs and livelihoods, but climate motion protects each.
Why climate models are still mistaken
Despite extensive research, most climate policy models ignore welfare impacts. When well-being is included, it is commonly measured in narrow economic terms that miss what matters most to people.
However, many areas have already been studied in ways in which may be incorporated into the model. Research has also quantified the loss from diseases similar to malaria, diarrhea and heart problems, in addition to mental health conditions, including depression and suicide.
For example, A large systematic review examined links between extreme heat and worsening mental health, including hospitalization for psychiatric conditions.
Other work shows how climate change affects employee productivity, recreation, conflict, migration, air quality and biodiversity. Studies have shown A transparent link between rising temperatures and declining labor productivity, and between Climate change and biodiversity loss, with implications for human health and food systems. These issues are central to people's lives and ought to be represented in policy modeling.
Some areas have been explored in research but still can't be included in climate policy models because they lack the numerical data needed for modeling. These areas include education, Cultural heritagesubjective well-being (how people evaluate and feel about their lives), and governance.
Some reviews Describe how climate change affects these features of life. However, in addition they emphasize that these effects are difficult to quantify in consistent, comparable ways, which is why they aren't yet represented in most climate models.
Inequality ought to be a part of the image
Climate change doesn't affect everyone equally. Women, children And older adults are sometimes more exposed. Evidence from the United Nations And global health research shows that these groups face higher mortality and displacement risks during climate-related disasters.
Some people face greater risks because they lack protected housing, live in areas already exposed to extreme heat, work outdoors, work outdoors or lack the financial resources to arrange for future impacts.
Those who contributed least to climate change often face the harshest consequences, especially in regions with limited technique of adaptation. This pattern has been widely described within the literature on climate risk and justice, e.g 2026 Global Climate Risk Index. Almost no climate policy model includes this inequality.
Climate change shouldn't be nearly emissions and temperature ranges. It affects how people live, work, eat, breathe, learn and feel. When models ignore welfare, they underestimate the advantages of climate motion and ignore the actual costs of inaction.
To create climate policy that reflects real human lives, fitness needs to maneuver from the margins to the middle of modeling efforts. Climate motion shouldn't be only an environmental imperative. It is an investment in global health, safety, dignity and justice.