Top 10 Public Health Challenges in 2025: Lessons and Priorities for 2025-2030

By 2025, global public health will be shaped by interconnected and intensifying threats that demand coordinated international action. Ten key public health challenges were identified and examined. This perspective reviews the challenges that shaped 2025 and the priorities set for the period 2025-2030, using evidence available up to July 2026; therefore, it is in part a retrospective assessment of that year rather than solely a prospective identification of challenges at its outset. The designation of the Top 10 denotes prominence and salience rather than a strict ordinal ranking. The challenges selected for this year include drug-resistant infections, health consequences of a warming planet, rising rates of psychological distress, persistent burden of long-term diseases and health inequities, preparedness for future disease outbreaks, widespread hunger and poor nutrition, shortages of doctors and nurses, harmful use of alcohol and drugs, barriers to reproductive and sexual well-being, and ethical questions raised by the growing role of computing and data-driven tools in medicine. Each challenge was examined in terms of its current scope, the populations most affected, and the strategies needed to mount an effective response to it. The analysis draws out the cross-cutting links among the 10 challenges and sets out a proposed agenda for action for 2025-2030. The adoption of the World Health Organization Pandemic Agreement by the World Health Assembly in May 2025 established an important framework for future cooperation, although the agreement had not been opened for signature and had not entered into force at the time of writing, and progress across most indicators continued to fall short of global targets. Pressures that intensified in 2025, notably the retrenchment of international health financing and the rapid clinical adoption of artificial intelligence ahead of rigorous evaluation, further sharpened several of these challenges.