Christiana Figueres Says Fossil Fuel Dependence Is Holding the World Hostage

Christiana Figueres has spent decades at the center of global climate negotiations, most famously shepherding the Paris Agreement to its unlikely conclusion in 2015. So when she describes the world's continued dependence on fossil fuels as a form of hostage-taking, it carries a particular weight. Speaking ahead of her new role as co-chair of a Lancet Commission examining the health consequences of sea-level rise, Figueres framed the climate crisis not merely as an environmental or economic failure, but as what she called "the mother of all injustices."

The framing is deliberate and significant. For years, climate advocacy has leaned heavily on the language of economics and geopolitics, arguing that the energy transition makes financial sense or that extreme weather threatens national security. What Figueres and the Lancet Commission are doing is different: they are centering the body, specifically the bodies of people who have contributed least to the problem and stand to lose the most.

Sea-level rise is often discussed in terms of maps and meters, the slow encroachment of coastlines, the disappearance of low-lying islands. But the Lancet Commission's focus draws attention to what happens to human health long before the water actually arrives. Saltwater intrusion contaminates freshwater supplies and agricultural land, driving malnutrition. Flooding accelerates the spread of waterborne diseases. Displacement, which the UN estimates could affect hundreds of millions of people by mid-century, is itself a profound health stressor, linked to mental illness, loss of social support networks, and reduced access to healthcare.

The populations most exposed to these cascading harms are, almost without exception, those who have emitted the least carbon historically. Small island developing states, coastal communities in South and Southeast Asia, and low-lying regions of sub-Saharan Africa face existential threats from a crisis they did not create. This is the injustice Figueres is naming, and it is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a measurable, documented disparity that sits at the intersection of epidemiology, geopolitics, and moral philosophy.

The Lancet has been tracking the health dimensions of climate change through its annual Countdown report since 2016, and the findings have grown more alarming with each edition. Heat-related mortality among older adults has increased sharply. The geographic range of disease vectors like the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries dengue and Zika, has expanded. Food insecurity linked to climate disruption is rising. The new commission on sea-level rise represents a deepening of that work, bringing together health scientists, climate researchers, and policy figures to examine a specific and underexamined threat pathway.

There is a systems-level dynamic at work here that rarely gets the attention it deserves. The countries and communities most vulnerable to sea-level rise and its health consequences are also the least equipped to finance adaptation. When health systems are overwhelmed by climate-related illness and displacement, economic productivity falls, tax revenues shrink, and the capacity to invest in resilient infrastructure erodes further. This is not a linear problem with a clean solution. It is a reinforcing feedback loop in which climate vulnerability deepens poverty, and poverty deepens climate vulnerability.

Figueres's framing of fossil fuel dependence as "hostage-taking" points to another loop: the political economy of energy. Countries that rely on fossil fuel revenues to fund public services, including healthcare, face a genuine structural trap. Transitioning away from those fuels threatens short-term fiscal stability, even as staying locked in guarantees long-term climate harm. This is the bind that makes international climate finance not a charitable gesture but a structural necessity. Without it, the transition cannot happen fast enough to matter.

The question of who should pay is not merely ethical. It is increasingly a legal and financial one. Climate litigation is expanding rapidly, with courts in multiple jurisdictions beginning to hold governments and corporations accountable for foreseeable climate harms. The Lancet Commission's work, by rigorously documenting the health costs of sea-level rise and tracing them back to emissions sources, could provide exactly the kind of evidentiary foundation that future litigation and loss-and-damage negotiations will require.

If the commission succeeds in shifting the climate conversation toward health outcomes and bodily harm, it may do something that decades of temperature targets and carbon budgets have struggled to achieve: make the stakes feel immediate, personal, and impossible to defer to the next generation.