Climate Change and Diabetes Outcomes: Evidence from Climate-Vulnerable Regions

Climate change is progressively recognized as an emerging determinant of metabolic health outcomes, particularly in relation to diabetes mellitus. This review summarizes mechanistic and epidemiological evidence linking climate-related exposures to diabetes outcomes: namely, 1) heat stress, 2) air pollution, and 3) extreme weather-related disruption of diabetes care.

Warming temperatures, worsening air quality, and more frequent extreme weather events are intensifying exposures that disproportionately affect populations with pre-existing chronic diseases; patients with diabetes may be at the center of climate-related vulnerability. While the greatest burden of diabetes is shouldered by countries in the Global South, these same regions are also at the front lines of climate change, facing extreme environmental conditions. Together, diabetes and climate change can converge to create compounding pressures on already strained public health systems in the world's most climate-vulnerable regions. Using global case studies from climate-vulnerable settings, we show the pathways through which diabetes outcomes and climate change can be connected highlighting the need for climate-informed diabetes prevention and management.