Experts warn players could face life-threatening conditions as climate change intensifies heat risks across host cities

A coalition of leading global experts in health, climate science and sports performance has issued a sharp warning to FIFA, accusing football’s governing body of maintaining dangerously weak heat safety standards ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Experts criticize FIFA heat safety guidelines and warn players could face life-threatening conditions as climate change intensifies heat risks across host cities

In a strongly worded open letter, seen by EdPublica, the experts argue that FIFA’s current thresholds for allowing matches to continue in extreme heat are “impossible to justify”, even for athletes who are fully acclimatised to hot conditions.

FIFA heat safety guidelines raising alarm

The tournament, set to be hosted across 16 cities in the United States, Mexico and Canada, is already raising alarm among scientists because of the likelihood of soaring temperatures and humidity during summer matches. Experts fear that players could be pushed into dangerous levels of heat stress, especially during afternoon kick-offs.

The warning comes amid growing concern that climate change is making extreme heat events more frequent and more severe worldwide. Scientists say the burning of fossil fuels is directly contributing to these rising temperatures — a point the letter connects to FIFA’s controversial sponsorship relationship with Saudi oil giant Aramco.

FIFA heat safety guidelines and fossil fuels

The authors of the letter describe FIFA’s “active promotion” of fossil fuels as “a conflict of interest with the protection of player welfare.”

Prof Mike Tipton from the University of Portsmouth’s Extreme Environments Lab and President of The Physiological Society warned that the dangers go beyond simple discomfort.

“Competitive exercise in hot environments can lead to a range of problems from impaired performance and enforced alterations in game strategy, to the medical emergency of heat stroke. Amongst the most important ways of minimising the chance of such hazards is to employ effective interventions, including complying with internationally recognised heat-related thresholds for the postponement or relocation of events. As it stands, and due in part to climate-change driven increases in environmental thermal stress, some of the venues for the 2026 World Cup are likely to exceed the recommended heat-related “high risk” threshold, especially during afternoon kick-offs”

At the centre of the criticism is FIFA’s current Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) threshold — a heat stress measure that factors in humidity, solar radiation, wind speed and air temperature. Under FIFA’s existing framework, matches may continue until WBGT levels exceed 32°C.

Experts argue that threshold is dangerously high. The open letter notes that a WBGT of nearly 32°C can correspond to air temperatures around 45°C with moderate humidity — conditions many scientists consider unsafe for intense athletic activity.

Professor Douglas Casa, CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut, said FIFA’s current rules fall well behind accepted scientific standards.

“The science supports the concept that high intensity sport above a 28oC Wet Bulb Globe Temperature can compromise performance and put a player at risk. The fact that under current FIFA Guidelines action will only be taken above 32oC is far from optimal. Additionally, the hydration break in each half absolutely needs to be longer than 3 minutes- at least five minutes for each break and preferably six. We hope this open letter convinces FIFA to update its heat guidelines before the World Cup.”

Although FIFA has introduced cooling breaks and a Heat Illness Mitigation and Management Task Force for the tournament, the experts say current measures remain insufficient. The letter argues that the existing three-minute cooling breaks are “too short to have a meaningful impact on rehydration and body cooling.”

The group is urging FIFA to adopt stricter protections similar to those recommended by FIFPRO, the international footballers’ union. Among the proposed measures are mandatory cooling breaks once WBGT exceeds 26°C and postponement or relocation of matches once temperatures rise above 28°C.

Professor Hugh Montgomery of University College London connected the debate directly to the broader climate crisis.

“Climate change threatens human health and survival, now. In this regard, the World Cup shines less bright, tarnished by its core funding coming from a major polluter and by the threat posed to players by the extreme temperatures to which they may now be exposed.”

The controversy also highlights the growing collision between elite sport and climate change. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is expected to become the most carbon-polluting tournament in history due to its expansion to 48 teams and the vast travel demands across three countries.

Recent events across global sport have intensified fears. In 2025, extreme heat at the Shanghai Masters reportedly caused Novak Djokovic to vomit on court, while tennis player Holger Rune publicly asked: “do you want a player to die on court?” after receiving treatment for heat stress.

As the countdown to the 2026 World Cup continues, pressure is now mounting on FIFA to decide whether football’s biggest spectacle can safely coexist with a rapidly warming planet.

Two billion. That is how many people on this planet eat what smallholder farmers grow. Not what agri-industrial combines harvest, not what commodity markets trade — what families with small plots of land pull from the soil, season after season, with the tools and seeds and knowledge they have. Two billion people. And a significant share of what keeps those harvests coming, what puts vitamins into the food and income into the household, has no name on any payroll, files no tax return, and has never once been thanked.

It is insects. Wild insects — bees, hoverflies, moths, beetles — moving flower to flower across millions of smallholder fields, doing work that no machine replicates and no subsidy replaces. Pollinator decline is dismantling that system quietly, field by field, season by season. A study published today in Nature, led by researchers at the University of Bristol, has for the first time traced exactly what that loss costs — not in abstracted ecosystem valuations, but in the vitamin A missing from a child’s diet, in the folate a pregnant woman never gets, in the farm income that does not arrive at the end of a harvest. The number at the end of that calculation is not a projection or a model. It is a measurement. And it is arresting.

Insect pollinators, the study found, are responsible for 44% of the farming income of the households tracked, and contribute more than 20% of dietary intake of vitamin A, folate and vitamin E — three nutrients whose deficiency is already linked to stunted child growth, weakened immunity and higher rates of disease. When pollinators vanish, the families don’t just grow less food. They grow less nutritious food, earn less money and become more vulnerable to illness. The cycle reinforces itself, downward.

Ten Villages, One Year, and a Chain of Evidence

The study centred on ten smallholder farming villages and their surrounding landscapes in Nepal. Over the course of a year, the research team — drawn from universities and non-governmental organisations across Nepal, the United Kingdom, the United States and Finland — tracked three things simultaneously: which insects were visiting which crops, what those crops yielded and how nutritious they were, and what the farming families were actually eating and earning.

It is, in structural terms, the kind of study that is very hard to pull off. Most research on pollinators stops at the field boundary — counting bee visits, measuring fruit set, estimating yield differentials. This one kept going, all the way to the dinner table and the household ledger. That continuity of evidence is what makes it significant.

The picture that emerged was not abstract or statistical. It was human. Over half the children in the study villages were too short for their age — a condition that goes by the clinical name of stunting and signals not just poor growth but compromised brain development, reduced immunity and diminished life prospects. The underlying cause, as the researchers documented it, was diet. And that diet depended, in ways the families could not easily see or control, on the insects working their fields.

Pollinator Decline: The Hidden Hunger Nobody Is Counting

There is a term in public health circles for the condition that the Nepal families illustrate: hidden hunger. It describes not the obvious, acute starvation that makes headlines, but the chronic, silent insufficiency of vitamins and minerals that undermines health even when enough calories are being consumed. A quarter of the global population currently suffers from it. It is, by most measures, one of the largest sources of preventable illness on the planet, and it is almost entirely invisible in the way society keeps score of environmental damage.

When a species goes extinct, when a forest is cleared, when an insect population crashes — the accounting of loss is typically measured in biodiversity metrics, in ecosystem service valuations, or in the emotional register of what is no longer there to see. It is almost never measured in folate deficiency, in children’s height-for-age charts, in the likelihood of a farming family falling into debt after a bad harvest.

That is what this study changes. It is not the first to establish that pollinator decline matters for nutrition in the abstract. But it is the first to demonstrate, with tracked data from real communities over a real year, the size and mechanism of the effect — and to show that the effect flows not just through calories but through the specific micronutrients that are hardest to replace.

Biodiversity as Medicine

Planetary Health — the field Dr Myers directs at Johns Hopkins — proceeds from a deceptively simple premise: human health and ecological health are not separate subjects. They are the same subject, studied from different ends. The degradation of natural systems is not a background condition to human development; it is one of the primary mechanisms by which human health is undermined.

That claim has long had intuitive force. What the Bristol study on pollinator decline provides is something more demanding: empirical evidence at the household level. It is one thing to argue that biodiversity loss will eventually compromise food security in a generalised way. It is another to show, village by village, season by season, that the decline in the bee community visiting a particular set of crops reduces particular vitamins in particular families’ diets by a measurable amount.

The phrasing matters. Biodiversity is not a luxury. In policy conversations, the language of luxury — or alternatively, of long-term concern — has frequently served to push ecological questions down the agenda. If the relationship between pollinator health and child health is as direct as this study finds, that framing becomes harder to sustain.

What Goes When the Bees Go

It is worth being specific about the nutritional stakes. Vitamin A deficiency impairs vision, particularly in low light, and compromises the immune system’s ability to fight infections that would otherwise be routine. Folate deficiency during pregnancy causes neural tube defects in developing foetuses, among other effects. Vitamin E is a key antioxidant, and its deficiency is associated with neurological damage and weakened immune function. These are not marginal health concerns. They sit near the top of the global burden of preventable disease.

The crops most dependent on animal pollination — fruits, many vegetables, pulses — are also, not coincidentally, among the most concentrated sources of these particular nutrients. A diet from which pollinator-dependent produce has been reduced or removed can look adequate in calorie terms while being profoundly inadequate in micronutrient terms. The families studied in Nepal were, in effect, already living that deficit, in a context where pollinator diversity is declining.

Globally, insect populations have been under sustained pressure for decades. Pesticide use, habitat loss, monoculture farming, climate change and artificial light at night have all been implicated in declines that researchers have called, in some cases, ecological collapse. The mechanisms are various; the direction of travel is consistent.

The Good News: Reversible by Design

The research is, in its implications, genuinely alarming. But the researchers are also at pains to emphasise something that is easy to miss in the headline findings: the relationship between pollinators and nutrition runs in both directions. If pollinator decline causes nutritional harm, pollinator recovery can produce nutritional gains. And the actions required are not exotic.

Planting wildflowers at field margins. Reducing pesticide inputs. Keeping native bee colonies. These are the kinds of changes that do not require new technology or large capital investment. They require farmers to understand what is happening in their fields at a level of detail most have not previously been given reason to consider. The researchers are already working on that — translating their findings into practical guidance and working with local organisations, government partners and farmers in Nepal to implement changes on the ground.

The approach is now informing Nepal’s emerging National Pollinator Strategy, an effort to make pollinator-friendly practices a standard part of everyday agriculture rather than a specialist conservation concern. The researchers report that farmers who have adopted even modest changes are already seeing improvements in crop yields, income and nutrition — a feedback loop that runs in the direction of health rather than away from it.

A Framework That Travels

Nepal is not an isolated case. Two billion people around the world depend on smallholder farming. Many of them face the same combination of circumstances: high dependence on pollinator-sensitive crops, limited dietary alternatives, micronutrient deficiencies that are already entrenched and ecosystems under stress. The findings from ten Nepali villages do not translate automatically to every agricultural context, but the framework — the method of tracing connections from insects to income to nutrition — does.

Diets even in industrialised countries still depend on pollinators and the ecosystems that sustain global agriculture. The buffer of wealth — the ability to import, substitute, supplement — is larger in wealthy countries, but it is not unlimited, and it does not protect the most economically vulnerable people even within those countries.

The lesson from this research on pollinator decline is less a specific warning about Nepal and more a methodological call to arms: to start measuring the connections that have, until now, been assumed or asserted but rarely demonstrated. When those connections are demonstrated, the case for protecting what remains of insect diversity becomes something different — not a moral preference or an aesthetic value, but a documented precondition for human health.

The Stakes

A quarter of the world’s people are living with hidden hunger. Over half the children in ten Nepali villages are stunted. Forty-four percent of the farming income in those communities flows, invisibly, through the wings of insects that nobody counted or protected until researchers started looking. The insects are in decline.

The study’s authors are careful, as scientists should be, to describe what they found and what it implies rather than what must be done. But the shape of the implication is not obscure. The fabric of life — the phrase Dr Myers uses — is not an abstraction. It is the thing that puts vitamins in a child’s diet and money in a family’s pocket. Tear large enough holes in it, and the consequences are not primarily ecological. They are medical. They are economic. They are, in the most direct sense, human. That’s why the new findings on pollinator decline matter.

The bees were always doing the work. We just weren’t watching closely enough to see it — or to understand what we stood to lose.

The quarter-life crisis is one of the most widely felt yet least talked-about experiences of early adulthood. Two psychologists explain why the pressure to have everything figured out is making an already difficult decade harder – and how self-compassion could be the most important skill a young person develops.

In recent years, conversations about mental health have become more visible, yet one experience faced by many young adults often remains unspoken: the quarter-life crisis. Across universities, workplaces, and homes, many individuals in their twenties quietly struggle with feelings of uncertainty about their future. They may have completed their education, secured a job, or be actively searching for one, yet a persistent question lingers: Is this the life I really want?

What many describe as a quarter-life crisis is often this exact feeling—uncertainty, comparison, and the quiet fear of falling behind. It’s a phase increasingly common among young adults, where expectations collide with reality, leaving many questioning their choices, direction, and sense of purpose.

The twenties have long been viewed as a time of opportunity, exploration, and independence. However, for many young adults today, this stage is also marked by intense pressure. Decisions about career paths, financial stability, relationships, and personal identity often converge during this period. At the same time, social comparisons — particularly through social media — can create the impression that everyone else seems to have their lives perfectly planned.

What Is a Quarter-Life Crisis, Really?

A quarter-life crisis isn’t just “being dramatic.” It is a period of uncertainty and emotional stress marked by feeling stuck or directionless, comparing yourself constantly to others, doubting your choices, anxiety about the future, and the pressure to have it all figured out. In a world where everyone seems to be thriving online, it is easy to feel like you are the only one struggling. But behind those curated posts, many are just as confused.

Psychologists describe this as a phase of emotional and psychological uncertainty that typically occurs in early adulthood. Unlike the widely discussed mid-life crisis, the quarter-life crisis often emerges when individuals are expected to transition into stable adult roles. The pressure to make the “right” decisions about career, relationships, and life direction can make this period particularly stressful. While these challenges can feel overwhelming, psychological research suggests that certain factors can help young adults navigate this phase more effectively.

Why Are We So Hard on Ourselves?

When things don’t go as planned, most of us turn inward with criticism.

“I should be doing better.” “I’m already behind.” “Everyone else has their life together.”

This inner voice can be harsh, unforgiving, and exhausting. And instead of helping, it makes the crisis feel heavier. That is where self-compassion comes in.

Self-Compassion: The Skill No One Taught Us

Self-compassion is not about being lazy or making excuses. It is about treating yourself with the same kindness you would offer a friend. Think about it: if your friend said they felt lost, would you tell them they were a failure? Probably not.

Psychologist Kristin Neff identifies three elements at the heart of self-compassion: self-kindness — being gentle with yourself instead of critical; common humanity — recognising that struggle is part of being human; and mindfulness — acknowledging your feelings without overreacting. It is not about ignoring your problems; it is about facing them without tearing yourself down.

How Self-Compassion Helps During a Crisis

When you practise self-compassion, something shifts. Instead of panicking, you pause. Instead of judging, you understand. Instead of spiralling, you ground yourself.

Research shows that people who are more self-compassionate experience lower anxiety and stress, better emotional resilience, greater clarity in decision-making, and improved overall wellbeing. Self-compassion does not solve a crisis overnight — but it changes how you go through it.

Small Ways to Be Kinder to Yourself

You do not need a complete life overhaul. Start small. Change your inner dialogue: replace “I’m failing” with “I’m figuring things out.” Take breaks without guilt — rest is productive too. Limit comparison; social media shows highlights, not reality. Celebrate small wins, because progress is not always loud. And ask for help. You do not have to do this alone.

A quarter-life crisis can feel like everything is falling apart. But sometimes, it is actually everything falling into place — just not in the way you expected. In the end, a quarter-life crisis is not a sign that you are failing. It is a sign that you are evolving, and with self-compassion, you can navigate this uncertainty with greater strength, clarity, and trust in your own journey.

Reference

>> Neff, K. (2003). Self-Compassion: An Alternative Conceptualization of a Healthy Attitude Toward Oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.

>> Robinson, O. C. (2019). A Longitudinal Mixed-Methods Case Study of Quarter-Life Crisis During the Post-university Transition: Locked-Out and Locked-In Forms in Combination. Emerging Adulthood, 7(3), 167–179. Scopus.

Glenda Fernandes is a researcher at Christ (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, with a focus on the psychological experiences of young adults, including quarter-life crisis, meaning in life, and self-compassion. Dr. Aiswarya V R is Assistant Professor at Christ (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, specialising in health and developmental psychology. She holds an MSc in Applied Psychology from the University of Calicut and a doctorate in Child Psychology from the University of Kerala.