Editorial: Climate change and human health: transdisciplinary perspectives

Résumé

One important contribution of this collection lies in demonstrating that climate change is increasingly implicated in the burden and distribution of major diseases. Liu et al. (2025), in their global observational study on tuberculosis, show that temperature and precipitation influence both incidence and mortality over time, including through lag effects. Their findings reveal marked regional and demographic differences, with particularly high burdens persisting in Africa and Southeast Asia. This study broadens the climate-health conversation by showing that climatic variability must be taken seriously in infectious disease surveillance, preparedness, and public health planning. A related but distinct contribution is offered by Brenner et al. (2024), who examine the interaction between weather conditions, air quality, and community-acquired pneumonia. Their findings show that climaterelated health risk is profoundly differentiated. Older age, male sex, high BMI, care dependence, and comorbidities such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease intensify susceptibility to weather-related pneumonia, while pollutants such as CO and PM2.5 further increase hospitalization risk. Taken together, these two studies challenge generalized understandings of vulnerability. They show that climate-related disease burdens are shaped not only by environmental exposure, but also by pre-existing clinical, social, and demographic inequalities.A particularly distinctive strength of this Research Topic is its attention to the mental health dimensions of climate change. While climate-health debates have often focused on mortality, morbidity, and infrastructure damage, the articles in this collection make clear that climate change is also a psychosocial crisis. The study on Cyclone Idai in Zimbabwe by Nyahunda et al. (2026) shows that climate-related disasters can generate profound mental health burdens, including trauma, depression, anxiety, hopelessness, sleeping disorders, and post-traumatic stress. Importantly, the study also reveals the policy and institutional silence surrounding mental health in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. By arguing for the integration of mental health into disaster and climate risk management strategies, the article makes a compelling case for more holistic and preventive approaches to climate governance. This psychosocial lens is deepened by Obiri-Yeboah et al. (2025), whose study of farmers in Ghana's Savannah region explores religion as a coping strategy in the face of climate-induced depressive symptoms. Flooding and drought-related livelihood losses, the authors show, can generate insomnia, appetite loss, cognitive distress, and even suicidal thoughts. Yet the study also demonstrates that faith, spiritual meaning, and hope are central resources through which people endure and interpret hardship. This is an important intervention because it reminds us of that climate-health responses must engage seriously with the cultural and moral worlds within which suffering and resilience are experienced. Seretlo-Rangata et al. (2025) similarly show that water scarcity in South Africa has significant psychological effects, including emotional distress, interpersonal conflict, and disruptions to everyday life. Their work expands the conversation beyond sudden disasters to slower and more chronic forms of climate-related stress. Complementing these studies, Matlakala et al. (2024) show through a scoping review that elderly people in sub-Saharan Africa remain underexamined in climate-disaster scholarship, despite facing acute physical, cognitive, and socio-economic vulnerabilities. Together, these articles underscore that climate change affects not only bodies and environments, but also emotional wellbeing, social relationships, dignity, and the conditions of everyday survival.Another central theme running through this collection is the importance of institutions, knowledge systems, and preparedness. Ogony et al. (2025) make this point vividly in their review of the burden of climate change on African public healthcare systems. They show that climate change is already straining health infrastructure, workforce capacity, and service delivery across a continent whose public health systems are often underfunded and overburdened. Their article is an important reminder that climate adaptation cannot be separated from questions of health-system resilience and public-sector investment. The significance of knowledge infrastructures is highlighted by Ramadani et al. (2025), who analyze climate-health literacy in Kosovo's pre-university curricula and textbooks. Their findings show that the integration of climate and health remains limited, fragmented, and insufficiently contextualized. This is a valuable contribution because it expands the meaning of preparedness beyond emergency response to include education, public awareness, and the long-term cultivation of climatehealth literacy. Likewise, De Guzman et al. (2025), in their scoping review of the Philippines, show that research on climate change and health has grown considerably in recent years, particularly in areas such as mental health, adaptation, and gendered vulnerability. At the same time, the review reveals persistent gaps, including limited long-term datasets, regional concentration of studies, and insufficient work on mitigation co-benefits. Their contribution is especially useful in showing that evidence production is itself uneven, and that stronger research infrastructures are essential for informing policy-relevant and equity-oriented climate-health action.If this Research Topic advances one overarching message, it is that climate change and human health cannot be addressed through disciplinary silos. Atela et al. (2024) show this clearly in their stakeholder analysis on climate change and health in Africa. Their findings indicate that health and climate communities still too often operate in isolation, with limited integration across research, policy, capacity building, and implementation. They call for stronger communities of practice, broader multisectoral collaboration, and more holistic approaches capable of responding to the complexity of African climate-health challenges. Black et al. (2024) take this argument further by making the case for community involvement in climate-health research. Their review demonstrates that participatory and community-engaged approaches can improve the relevance, legitimacy, and ethical grounding of research, while also enabling co-produced strategies that are more responsive to local realities. This is especially important in the context of climate justice, where those most affected by environmental change are often the least represented in knowledge production and decision-making. In this respect, transdisciplinarity must mean more than collaboration between academic fields; it must also entail engagement with communities, Indigenous and local knowledge systems, and the lived realities of vulnerable populations.This Research Topic highlights the breadth and complexity of the relationship between climate change and human health. The contributions show that climate-health challenges are at once epidemiological, psychological, institutional, educational, and political. They also demonstrate that vulnerability is never generic; rather, it is shaped by age, comorbidity, geography, livelihood, social exclusion, and the strength or weakness of public institutions. Overall, the articles in this collection move the field beyond narrow and fragmented understandings of climate-related health risks. They call for approaches that integrate disease surveillance with psychosocial care, institutional resilience with health literacy, and scientific inquiry with community participation. In doing so, they offer an important foundation for future scholarship, policy, and practice. More importantly, they remind us that the challenge of climate change and human health is not only to understand risk more fully, but also to build more just, inclusive, and context-sensitive pathways of response.

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