The report of the Lancet Commission on ‘21st Century Global Threats to Health’ has identified seventeen threats to global health: air pollution, antimicrobial resistance, childhood malnutrition, climate change, the collapse of development and health assistance and aid, conventional conflicts, high alcohol use, high blood pressure, income inequality, low educational attainment, the malicious use of AI, nuclear conflict, obesity, pandemics, poor mental health, smoking, and unhealthy ageing. These are threats to health and life on Earth. Social, political and economic conditions produce and impose these threats on people. Their impacts will be uneven, and working and marginalised populations in underdeveloped and developing countries will pay the greater price. The Lancet report projects that these seventeen threats will contribute to a total loss of at least one billion years of healthy life by the end of the century if they are not averted through changes in policy direction and positive policy interventions. These threats are not independent from each other but interconnected issues that define the planetary crisis of our times.
What are the sources or origins of these seventeen threats?
Capitalism as an economic, political, social and cultural system produces conditions in which corporations overexploit nature, destroy the environment, and impose climate change and crisis on poor people in terms of lives and livelihoods. Extractive and other large-scale industries cause water, air and land pollution, which causes respiratory diseases and kills more than 8 million people annually worldwide. Climate-driven wildfire smoke claimed over 154,000 lives globally, according to Health Policy Watch. The WHO report predicts that extreme heatwaves could cause 250,000 deaths annually between 2030 and 2050. The environmental crisis is further aggravated by the use of pesticides and various fertilisers in agriculture, which pollutes land, air, water and food.
Profit-driven agriculture under the capitalist system uses 70% of all antimicrobials in livestock, aquaculture and farming. Antimicrobials are not used to treat illness but are added to animal feed for rapid growth, and they are transmitted to humans through the contaminated food chain, creating conditions for antimicrobial resistance. This is further aggravated by the privatisation of health, where sickness is a business for profit. Medical practitioners are paid by the pharmaceutical industry to overprescribe antibiotics and made it accessible for public without prescription which accelerates antimicrobial resistance. A Lancet and WHO study reveals that antimicrobial resistance directly causes 1.14 million deaths and is associated with 4.71 million deaths globally each year. The environmental crisis breeds various pandemics that cause millions of deaths. COVID-19 has caused approximately 7.12 million deaths worldwide.
According to the WHO, tobacco smoking caused roughly 100 million deaths in the 20th century, and if the current trends persist, smoking can cause up to 1 billion deaths in the 21st century. Governments continue to promote it in different ways by following the rent-seeking culture of capitalism. Historically, tobacco industries played a central role in converting a need-based society into a desire-based society in the 20th century, in line with the requirements of capitalism. Similarly, capitalist rent-seeking policies frame, promote and implement alcohol policies through governments, causing 2.6 million deaths worldwide each year.
Wars and conflicts are not natural; they are promoted by imperialist forces to sustain capitalist exploitation and domesticate people and control their resources. Data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (2026), a Brown University study, and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) reveal the cost of wars in terms of deaths and destitution. In the 20th century, more than 231 million people lost their lives in wars and conflicts; similarly, in the 21st century, more than 9 million have died due to wars and conflicts so far. All these deaths were avoidable, but they were imposed on people by imperialist wars, geopolitical hegemony, and resource conflicts waged to uphold capitalism as the dominant system.
The culture of atomisation, alienation, individualisation, commodification and mass consumerism produced by capitalist culture creates conditions for poor mental health and unhealthy aging. The WHO study reveals that roughly 8 million deaths by suicide per year globally are due to mental health issues, and 1 billion people live with different forms and levels of mental health conditions across the world. Stressful living conditions, sleep deprivation, restless lifestyle, loneliness, poor diet, smoking and substance use cause unhealthy aging. These conditions are created by the capitalist system, in which insecurity, competition, crisis and conflict have destroyed the collective foundations of life and happiness. It is calculated that 69% of global deaths are due to unhealthy ageing. It is estimated by the WHO that obesity causes 3.7 million deaths worldwide and that more than 1.9 billion adults suffer from obesity.
Obesity, on the one hand, and child malnutrition, on the other, are contradictory challenges produced by a single source called capitalism, which produces conditions of economic crisis, exploitation and income inequality that breed hunger, homelessness, illness and child malnutrition. The WHO argues that 45% of all deaths in children under 5 years of age globally are linked to malnutrition, causing an estimated 2.2 million to 2.4 million child deaths annually worldwide. The collapse of welfare states in pursuit of economic austerity and the destruction of ‘Development Assistance for Health’ by global institutions and governments accelerate the global health crisis.
The weaponisation of AI and the threat of the use of nuclear weapons by imperialist forces in recent wars pose the greatest danger to human life and the planet. The world produces enough food, homes, employment and wealth, but it is controlled by a very few individuals and families in an economy dominated by capitalist and imperialist forces.Capitalism means accumulation of profit at the cost of people, lives, livelihoods and nature. Therefore, the struggle for life and sustainability based on an egalitarian political, economic, cultural and social order shaped by distributive justice can ensure security, peace, prosperity and happiness in the world. There is no alternative but to defeat capitalism in order to establish an alternative and organic system called socialism, where the collective foundation of life can be re-established to end death and destitution in the contemporary world.
The writer teaches at the London Metropolitan University.
