Forty-two point six percent of countries worldwide reported changes in the prevalence or severity of skin disease tied to climate change, with low- and lower-middle-income nations carrying a disproportionate burden, according to a 136-country analysis presented at the 2026 European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV) Congress in Vienna, Austria.

The cross-sectional survey drew responses from participants across all six WHO regions. Respondents shared country-level insights on climate impacts and the prevalence of climate-attributable dermatologic disease, yielding one of the broadest dermatology-specific climate datasets yet assembled.

How does income shape the signal?

The income gradient was stark. Among 136 responding countries, rates of climate-attributable dermatologic change fell along this curve:

• Low-income countries: 55.6%
• Lower-middle-income countries: 52.5%
• Upper-middle-income countries: 43.8%
• High-income countries: 28.3%

The nearly two-fold gap between the lowest and highest income tiers frames climate-driven skin disease as an equity issue, not a uniform global trend.

Where are the changes most pronounced?

Geography amplified the pattern. The Western Pacific Region led the field, with 64.7% of respondents flagging climate-attributable shifts in dermatologic disease. The Eastern Mediterranean and South-East Asian regions tied at 60%. Europe reported the lowest rate at 16.1%, roughly one-quarter of the global figure.

In the African Region, 42.9% of respondents said they were unsure about climate impact on skin disease, a level of uncertainty the authors attribute to limited surveillance infrastructure and weak evidence capacity rather than absence of effect.

Which conditions are driving the rise?

Among the 58 countries that confirmed climate-associated effects on skin disease, three diagnostic categories dominated:

• Heat rashes: 81%
• Inflammatory skin disease: 75.9%
• Infectious disease: 62.1%, with 50% noting vector-borne changes

The biological mechanism runs through several converging pathways. Heat and humidity intensify sweating and skin irritation; air pollution and other environmental exposures trigger or worsen inflammation; and shifting temperature and rainfall patterns expand the habitats of mosquitoes, ticks, and other arthropod disease vectors into ranges where they were previously uncommon.

What should dermatologists watch for?

Presenting author Esther Freeman, MD, PhD — the inaugural L'Oréal Dermatological Beauty / CeraVe Endowed Chair in Global Health Dermatology, Director of Global Health Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Associate Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School in Boston — framed the implications.

"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 said.

Freeman positioned dermatology as a frontline discipline for climate-related disease. "We often think of respiratory disease or other diseases, but skin is really a frontline barrier to climate change."

Which vector-borne conditions are moving into new ranges?

Freeman singled out dengue and chikungunya as the clearest examples of dermatologically relevant vector change spreading into previously non-endemic settings.

"Heat-related rashes are definitely increasingly going to become an issue, and we've already started to see that," she said. "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."

The 2026 EADV dataset positions climate-linked skin disease as a dermatology monitoring priority, with practices in low-resource and tropical settings likely to absorb the bulk of new case volume as vector ranges continue to expand over the coming decade.