Dengue in a changing climate Ebi, Kristie L.; Nealon, Joshua
Environmental research,
November 2016, 2016-Nov, 2016-11-00, 20161101, Volume:
151
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Dengue is the world’s most important arboviral disease in terms of number of people affected. Over the past 50 years, incidence increased 30-fold: there were approximately 390 million infections in ...2010. Globalization, trade, travel, demographic trends, and warming temperatures are associated with the recent spread of the primary vectors Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus and of dengue. Overall, models project that new geographic areas along the fringe of current geographic ranges for Aedes will become environmentally suitable for the mosquito’s lifecycle, and for dengue transmission. Many endemic countries where dengue is likely to spread further have underdeveloped health systems, increasing the substantial challenges of disease prevention and control. Control focuses on management of Aedes, although these efforts have typically had limited effectiveness in preventing outbreaks. New prevention and control efforts are needed to counter the potential consequences of climate change on the geographic range and incidence of dengue, including novel methods of vector control and dengue vaccines.
•The incidence of dengue has increased 30-fold over the past 50 years.•Climate is one important driver of the current distribution and incidence of dengue.•The geographic ranges of the primary Aedes mosquito vectors are expanding.•This may lead to a greater burden of dengue in low- and middle-income countries.•Effective measures are needed to manage the changing spread and incidence of dengue.
Wildfires, Global Climate Change, and Human Health Xu, Rongbin; Yu, Pei; Abramson, Michael J ...
New England journal of medicine/The New England journal of medicine,
11/2020, Volume:
383, Issue:
22
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Wildfires are increasingly common and projected to worsen with climate change. Health consequences include burns and mental health effects, as well as risks from air pollutants in smoke. Cutting ...carbon emissions to limit the global temperature increase to 2.0°C or 1.5°C above the preindustrial level would markedly reduce wildfire risks.
Hot ambient conditions and associated heat stress can increase mortality and morbidity, as well as increase adverse pregnancy outcomes and negatively affect mental health. High heat stress can also ...reduce physical work capacity and motor-cognitive performances, with consequences for productivity, and increase the risk of occupational health problems. Almost half of the global population and more than 1 billion workers are exposed to high heat episodes and about a third of all exposed workers have negative health effects. However, excess deaths and many heat-related health risks are preventable, with appropriate heat action plans involving behavioural strategies and biophysical solutions. Extreme heat events are becoming permanent features of summer seasons worldwide, causing many excess deaths. Heat-related morbidity and mortality are projected to increase further as climate change progresses, with greater risk associated with higher degrees of global warming. Particularly in tropical regions, increased warming might mean that physiological limits related to heat tolerance (survival) will be reached regularly and more often in coming decades. Climate change is interacting with other trends, such as population growth and ageing, urbanisation, and socioeconomic development, that can either exacerbate or ameliorate heat-related hazards. Urban temperatures are further enhanced by anthropogenic heat from vehicular transport and heat waste from buildings. Although there is some evidence of adaptation to increasing temperatures in high-income countries, projections of a hotter future suggest that without investment in research and risk management actions, heat-related morbidity and mortality are likely to increase.
The 2021 report coincides with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), at which countries are facing pressure to realise the ambition of the Paris ...Agreement to keep the global average temperature rise to 1·5°C and to mobilise the financial resources required for all countries to have an effective climate response. To meet the Paris Agreement goals and prevent catastrophic levels of global warming, global greenhouse gas emissions must reduce by half within a decade. ...at the current pace of reduction, it would take more than 150 years for the energy system to fully decarbonise (indicator 3.1), and the unequal response between countries is resulting in an uneven realisation of the health benefits of a low-carbon transition. With a slower pace of decarbonisation and poorer air quality regulations than countries in the very high HDI group, the medium and high HDI country groups produce the most fine particle matter (PM2·5) emissions and have the highest rates of air pollution-related deaths, which are about 50% higher than the total deaths in the very high HDI group (indicator 3.3).
The healthcare sector is a significant contributor to global carbon emissions, in part due to extensive travelling by patients and health workers.
To evaluate the potential of telemedicine services ...based on videoconferencing technology to reduce travelling and thus carbon emissions in the healthcare sector.
A life cycle inventory was performed to evaluate the carbon reduction potential of telemedicine activities beyond a reduction in travel related emissions. The study included two rehabilitation units at Umeå University Hospital in Sweden. Carbon emissions generated during telemedicine appointments were compared with care-as-usual scenarios. Upper and lower bound emissions scenarios were created based on different teleconferencing solutions and thresholds for when telemedicine becomes favorable were estimated. Sensitivity analyses were performed to pinpoint the most important contributors to emissions for different set-ups and use cases.
Replacing physical visits with telemedicine appointments resulted in a significant 40-70 times decrease in carbon emissions. Factors such as meeting duration, bandwidth and use rates influence emissions to various extents. According to the lower bound scenario, telemedicine becomes a greener choice at a distance of a few kilometers when the alternative is transport by car.
Telemedicine is a potent carbon reduction strategy in the health sector. But to contribute significantly to climate change mitigation, a paradigm shift might be required where telemedicine is regarded as an essential component of ordinary health care activities and not only considered to be a service to the few who lack access to care due to geography, isolation or other constraints.
Extreme heat adversely affects human health, productivity, and well-being, with more frequent and intense heatwaves projected to increase exposures. However, current risk projections oversimplify ...critical inter-individual factors of human thermoregulation, resulting in unreliable and unrealistic estimates of future adverse health outcomes.
The new scenario framework for climate change research envisions combining pathways of future radiative forcing and their associated climate changes with alternative pathways of socioeconomic ...development in order to carry out research on climate change impacts, adaptation, and mitigation. Here we propose a conceptual framework for how to define and develop a set of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) for use within the scenario framework. We define SSPs as reference pathways describing plausible alternative trends in the evolution of society and ecosystems over a century timescale, in the absence of climate change or climate policies. We introduce the concept of a space of challenges to adaptation and to mitigation that should be spanned by the SSPs, and discuss how particular trends in social, economic, and environmental development could be combined to produce such outcomes. A comparison to the narratives from the scenarios developed in the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) illustrates how a starting point for developing SSPs can be defined. We suggest initial development of a set of basic SSPs that could then be extended to meet more specific purposes, and envision a process of application of basic and extended SSPs that would be iterative and potentially lead to modification of the original SSPs themselves.
The climate change research community is developing a toolkit for creating new scenarios to explore and evaluate the extensive uncertainties associated with future climate change and development ...pathways. Components of the toolkit include pathways for greenhouse gas emissions over this century and their associated magnitude and pattern of climate change; descriptions of a range of possible socioeconomic development pathways, including qualitative narratives and quantitative elements; and climate change policies to achieve specific levels of radiative forcing and levels of adaptive capacity. These components are combined within a matrix architecture to create a scenario. Five reference socioeconomic development pathways have been described along axes describing increasing socioeconomic and environmental challenges to adaptation and to mitigation. This paper extends these global pathways to describe their possible consequences for public health and health care, and considers the additional elements that could be added to increase the relevance of the new scenarios to address a wider range of policy relevant questions than previously possible. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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