The Threat List

Status:Environment

GlobalEnvironmentDeep-sourcedmedium confidenceSourcing reviewed 2026-09-17

Extreme Heat

Extreme heat is a widespread and escalating global health, economic, and environmental hazard. The supplied evidence documents substantial mortality, lost labor productivity, health costs, and agricultural losses, with impacts expected to worsen as temperatures rise.

Severity score

85.1

Catastrophic · default weighting

Trajectory

Steady

How this is ranked

What this is

Score breakdown

Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.

Loss of life

78

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

92

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

91

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

74

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

94

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.

Audit trail

Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.

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