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The report draws on world-class expertise from climate scientists, ecologists, mathematicians, geographers, engineers, energy, food, livestock, and transport experts, economists, social and political scientists, public health professionals, and doctors. The Lancet Countdown's work builds on decades of research in this field, and was first proposed in the 2015 Lancet Commission on health and climate change,1 which documented the human impacts of climate change and provided ten global recommendations to respond to this public health emergency and secure the public health benefits available (panel 1). The following four key messages derive from the Lancet Countdown's 2018 report Present day changes in heat waves, labour capacity, vector-borne disease, and food security provide early warning of the compounded and overwhelming impact on public health that are expected if temperatures continue to rise. Correspondingly, global subsidies for fossil fuels continued to decrease, and carbon pricing only covers 13·1% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, a number that is expected to increase to more than 20% when planned legislation in China is implemented in late 2018 (indicators 4.6 and 4.7).

In 2022, the Lancet Countdown warned that people's health is at the mercy of fossil fuels and stressed the transformative opportunity of jointly tackling the concurrent climate change, energy, cost-of-living, and health crises for human health and wellbeing. Harnessing the rapidly advancing science of detection and attribution, new analysis shows that over 60% of the days that reached health-threatening high temperatures in 2020 were made more than twice as likely to occur due to anthropogenic climate change (indicator 1.1.5); and heat-related deaths of people older than 65 years increased by 85% compared with 1990–2000, substantially higher than the 38% increase that would have been expected had temperatures not changed (indicator 1.1.5). [...]those countries that have historically contributed the least to climate change are bearing the brunt of its health impacts—both a reflection and a direct consequence of the structural inequities that lie within the root causes of climate change. The 2022 Lancet Countdown report highlighted the opportunity to accelerate the transition away from health-harming fossil fuels in response to the global energy crisis.

With the most underserved communities most affected, these economic impacts further reduce their capacity to cope with and recover from the growing impacts of climate change, thereby amplifying global inequities. Concerningly, multiple hazards revealed by individual indicators are likely to have simultaneous compounding and cascading impacts on the complex and interconnected human systems that sustain good health, disproportionately threatening people's health and survival with every fraction of a degree of increase in global mean temperature. Only 68% of countries reported high-to-very-high implementation of legally mandated health emergency management capacities in 2023, of which just 11% were low HDI countries (indicator 2.2.5). [...]only 35% of countries reported having health early warning systems for heat-related illness, whereas 10% did so for mental and psychosocial conditions (indicator 2.2.1). [...]their strategies are pushing the world further off track from meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement, further threatening people's health and survival.

For the Chinese, French, German, and Spanish translations of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section.TRANSLATIONSFor the Chinese, French, German, and Spanish translations of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section.

This dissertation is composed of four separate projects, completed over the course of my PhD. The first paper, Chapter 2, shows how public land management in the United States (U.S.) is shaped by perceptions of the multiple use mandate and its implementation. This paper recommends statutory amendments to effect change in public land management, rather than focusing only on supposed failings of the implementing agency of the multiple use mandate. Chapter 3 applies the problem orientation framework to elucidate problem frames in media representations of oil and gas development in Colorado, demonstrating that the use of this framework can effectively reveal patterns and fundamental conflicts among stakeholders in relation to their perspectives on “the problem” of oil and gas development. Chapter 4 compiles work on tracking media coverage of climate change demonstrating changes in trends over time and exploring the potential influences on these trends. Chapter 5 demonstrates that researchers and scientists who create tools to support decision-makers have comprehensive and experiential understandings of how to produce science that is useful and usable, but they face institutional barriers which can make it difficult to create and maintain these tools such that they continue to be used by decision-makers. This offers an alternative view of why there is a persistent gap between the creation of scientific knowledge and its use in policy and decision-making – it is not simply a problem of researchers or decision-makers being unaware or uninformed, rather there are scarce resources and changing political and technological contexts which add to the challenge.