Ed. N.-According to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the number of new cancer cases worldwide could reach nearly 35 million per year by 2050 if countries do not rapidly strengthen prevention, early detection, and treatments. Currently, new annual cases are estimated at 20.6 million and deaths at nearly 10 million, making cancer the second leading cause of death globally. The report highlights profound survival inequalities: in high-income countries, 87% of women with breast cancer survive five years after diagnosis, compared to only 42% in low-income countries. The WHO insists that these inequalities are not inevitable but result from political choices. Nearly four out of ten cancers are linked to avoidable risk factors: smoking, alcohol, obesity, physical inactivity, unbalanced diet, infections, and air pollution. While progress has been made (decline in smoking, vaccination, national plans), access to essential medicines remains highly unequal across countries’ income levels. The WHO calls for putting patients and their loved ones at the heart of health policies.
While the WHO report emphasizes the urgency of strengthening prevention against largely avoidable risk factors, former cancer researcher and anti-capitalist activist Hamza Hamouchene pushes the reflection further in the article translated below: he demonstrates, through his personal journey, that the same capitalist logic that prioritizes symptomatic treatment of cancers at the expense of environmental prevention also hinders the fight against the climate crisis, calling for a radical break with the status quo.-FG/Tlaxcala
What does cancer research have to do with the climate crisis? For Hamza Hamouchene, everything. Drawing on his journey from lab to activism, he shows how the same capitalist logic — treating symptoms, protecting profits — is killing us twice.
Hamza Hamouchene, tni, July 2, 2026
It is now common knowledge that exposure to certain chemicals (such as those found in cigarette smoke) can cause cancer, but that was not the case at the start of the 20th century. At that time, scientists were not even sure that carcinogenic chemicals actually existed. All they knew was that workers in the paraffin, shale oil and coal tar industries had a high incidence of skin cancer; the identity of the particular chemical within these tars that causes cancer remained a mystery. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s that scientists at the Cancer Hospital Research Institute in London (which later became the Institute of Cancer Research) made this discovery. After years of research, Ernest Kennaway and his team found that the cancer-causing agents are a group of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). The first PAH to be categorically identified, in 1932, was a compound called benzo(a)pyrene. This was a monumental scientific breakthrough: benzo(a)pyrene was the first pure compound to be shown to have cancer-causing properties, and the first carcinogen to be found in cigarette smoke. (We now know there are many others).
When I joined the Institute of Cancer Research about 20 years ago as a young researcher, I felt honoured to be following in the footsteps of Kennaway and his colleagues. I was eager to contribute to the ongoing effort to understand and to prevent cancer. Yet, despite my enthusiasm for my work at the Institute, just a few years later I left the field of cancer research behind me. Instead, I chose to pursue political ecology and activism for climate and environmental justice.
You may be wondering why I’m telling you about all this. After all, what does cancer research have to do with the climate crisis? In fact, as I argue in this piece, there are many lessons from the field of cancer research (and biomedical sciences more widely) that can help us in addressing the climate emergency. These arise in part from the parallels between the mainstream approaches to tackling these two issues – cancer and climate change.
In this piece I delve into these parallels, drawing on my own personal journey from cancer research to environmental activism. The personal is political, as the slogan goes, and I believe that my own experience, though far from being typical, can provide some insights that might be helpful in the struggle to prevent climate breakdown.
Cancer is an Environmental Disease
When I embarked on my PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research, I had high hopes about pursuing a career in scientific research. I wanted to contribute to increasing our understanding of cancer in order to help eradicate it. The focus of my research at that time was what’s called ‘environmental carcinogenesis’ – studying how environmental factors contribute to the formation of cancerous cells and tumours. More specifically, I was looking at the cellular impacts that result from exposure to the carcinogenic compounds (the PAHs mentioned earlier) that are generated from processes like burning tobacco and the combustion of fossil fuels.
The more experiments my team and I conducted, and the more research by the global scientific community I read, the more I became convinced that cancer is largely an environmental disease. An astonishing 90% of cancer cases (external link) are estimated to be driven by external factors – lifestyle, surroundings, and pollutants – rather than solely by heredity or genetics. Major culprits are tobacco (which causes nearly 90% of lung cancers), poor nutrition, alcohol, sun exposure, some infections and certain chemicals.
Perhaps most important of all is the pollution in our environment. Environmental pollution is an international public health (external link) problem, with multiple negative effects on health – including causing cancer. Many environmental pollutants have been proven to be carcinogenic: asbestos, benzene, exhaust gases from gasoline engines, food and water contaminants (such as arsenic), persistent organic pollutants (external link) (such as pesticides and dioxins (external link)), and smoke from burning fossil fuels (external link) and biomass for domestic heating.
These external influences – from tobacco and alcohol to pesticides and smoke – trigger genetic mutations in our bodies that can lead to cancer. Cancer can therefore be understood as an environmental disease.
The positive side of this is that it means that a large part of the cancer epidemic may be preventable. We just need to reduce people’s exposure to these carcinogenic influences. The bad news is that this is not yet happening – or is not happening at an adequate level.