What Skin Conditions Are Worsening Due to Climate Change?
More than 40% of countries worldwide are reporting climate-related changes in the prevalence and/or severity of skin disease, with lower-income countries disproportionately affected.
The findings, presented at the 2026 European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV) Congress in Vienna, Austria, comprise data from 136 countries.
For the study, participants shared insights on climate impacts and the prevalence of climate change-related skin diseases in their countries.
Overall, 42.6% reported changes in the prevalence and/or severity of skin disease due to climate change, with significant differences according to income level.
More than half of low-income (55.6%) and lower-middle-income countries (52.5%) reported climate-related changes in skin disease, compared with 43.8% of upper-middle-income and 28.3% of high-income countries, the study showed.
Geographical differences were also substantial, with changes most frequently reported in the Western Pacific Region (64.7%), followed by the Eastern Mediterranean and Southeast Asian regions (60% each), compared with 16.1% in the European Region.
In the African Region, 42.9% of respondents were unsure about the impact of climate change on skin disease, highlighting potential gaps in surveillance and evidence.
Among the 58 countries reporting climate-associated effects on skin disease, 81% reported increases in heat rashes and 75.9% in inflammatory skin diseases. Changes in infectious diseases were reported in 62.1%, with half reporting changes in vector-borne diseases.
Presenting author Esther Freeman, MD, PhD, the inaugural L’Oréal Dermatological Beauty/CeraVe Endowed Chair in Global Health Dermatology, and Director of Global Health Dermatology at Mass General, and an Associate Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School, in Boston, MA, talked to The Dermatology Digest about the findings and their implications for dermatologists.
“The important point from the study is that climate change is already affecting what people are seeing in dermatology, and this seems to be more of an issue for low-resource countries,” she says.
“We often think of respiratory disease or other diseases, but skin is really a frontline barrier to climate change.”
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“Heat-related rashes are definitely increasingly going to become an issue, and we’ve already started to see that,” she says. “There are also changes in vector populations because we don’t think of ourselves as necessarily a place where there’s a lot of dengue and chikungunya, but that is changing now, and that situation is probably only going to increase.”
