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Infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent and damaging, countries’ capacity to recover from them is diminishing, and climate change is at the centre of the problem, conclude two international expert commissions that reported in tandem May 17 and 18.

On Sunday, the Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, chaired by former Icelandic prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, headlined that climate change is a health crisis, and “fixing it is a health opportunity.” It concluded that the spread of insect- and other vector-borne diseases, the health impacts of extreme weather events, food insecurity, and air pollution warrant designating climate change as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), the World Health Organization’s highest level of urgency, the Guardian reports.

“Far from being a fading priority or fake news, climate change poses an immediate and long-term threat to health, economic, food, water, environmental, personal, community, and national security,” the commission wrote. With global energy prices volatile and supply chains under strain, action at the intersection of climate change and health is also a smart investment, the commission added in a release.

“The climate crisis may not be a pandemic, but it’s still a public health emergency that threatens humanity’s very health and survival,” Jakobsdóttir added in an interview with the Guardian. “And if we don’t act more quickly and comprehensively, many millions more people could die or face life-changing illness.”

On Monday, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) warned [pdf] in its final report that those risks are becoming more severe, and climate change is one of two factors exacerbating them, along with armed conflict. The report cites “alarming” evidence that trust is eroding and inequities are coming to the fore at just the moment when countries need better pandemic risk monitoring, equitable access to countermeasures, and sustainable financing/

“Public health emergencies of the past 10 years—from Ebola to mpox—demonstrate that the world is not substantially safer from their impact, with rising economic and social costs, weakening access to medical countermeasures, declining financing, and societies emerging poorer, more unequal, and more divided,” the report states. “Most critical, the bedrock of [pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response]—trust and equity—is collapsing. Trust is eroding: between governments and citizens; between countries; in multilateral organizations; in industry. Deep-rooted inequity is exposed: in access to information, knowledge, financing, and countermeasures, from personal protective equipment to life-saving vaccines.”

“Everyone who has the responsibility for the well-being and the development of their people should be concerned because we definitely are not ready for the next pandemic,” GPMB co-chair Joy Phumaphi, chair of the Botswana National Gender Commission and the country’s former health minister, told CBC News.

“We need an army of community health workers,” Phumaphi added. “Everybody needs to be prepared for the next pandemic.”

Those concerns have been breaking through into the headlines over the last week. On Sunday, the World Health Organization declared the Ebola virus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, after reporting 88 dead and more than 300 people infected. Less than a week earlier, the WHO told countries to expect more cases of hantavirus after three deaths and a total of nine cases were reported on a cruise ship sailing from Argentina to Cape Verde.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) officially announced the Ebola outbreak on Friday, and its director general Jean Kaseya told the Guardian he was “on panic mode”. That’s because Ebola is highly contagious and has a high death rate, particularly in poorer countries that don’t have the resources available in a state-of-the-art intensive care unit.

Reinforcing the GPMB’s concern about effective monitoring, the New York Times reports that it took weeks for local surveillance and testing to track the Ebola outbreak and identify the strain.

Now, Africa CDC is concerned about further spread of the disease, the Guardian reports, since the large majority of the cases so far have been reported in Ituri province, a region that shares borders with Uganda and South Sudan. The province has seen considerable violence, and it’s also the location of a number of mining towns “where people are constantly coming and going, making infectious disease control challenging,” the Guardian says.