Summary This Series has examined the health implications of policies aimed at tackling climate change. Assessments of mitigation strategies in four domains—household energy, transport, food and ...agriculture, and electricity generation—suggest an important message: that actions to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions often, although not always, entail net benefits for health. In some cases, the potential benefits seem to be substantial. This evidence provides an additional and immediate rationale for reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions beyond that of climate change mitigation alone. Climate change is an increasing and evolving threat to the health of populations worldwide. At the same time, major public health burdens remain in many regions. Climate change therefore adds further urgency to the task of addressing international health priorities, such as the UN Millennium Development Goals. Recognition that mitigation strategies can have substantial benefits for both health and climate protection offers the possibility of policy choices that are potentially both more cost effective and socially attractive than are those that address these priorities independently.
The World Health Organisation estimates that the warming and precipitation trends due to anthropogenic climate change of the past 30 years already claim over 150,000 lives annually. Many prevalent ...human diseases are linked to climate fluctuations, from cardiovascular mortality and respiratory illnesses due to heatwaves, to altered transmission of infectious diseases and malnutrition from crop failures. Uncertainty remains in attributing the expansion or resurgence of diseases to climate change, owing to lack of long-term, high-quality data sets as well as the large influence of socio-economic factors and changes in immunity and drug resistance. Here we review the growing evidence that climate-health relationships pose increasing health risks under future projections of climate change and that the warming trend over recent decades has already contributed to increased morbidity and mortality in many regions of the world. Potentially vulnerable regions include the temperate latitudes, which are projected to warm disproportionately, the regions around the Pacific and Indian oceans that are currently subjected to large rainfall variability due to the El Niño/Southern Oscillation sub-Saharan Africa and sprawling cities where the urban heat island effect could intensify extreme climatic events.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on March 31, 2014. This report was the second instalment of the Fifth Assessment Report, prepared by Working Group 2, ...on impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation to climate change. In this Comment, we, as contributors to the chapter on human health, explain how the IPCC report was prepared and highlight important findings.
Background: In 2008, the World Health Organization (WHO) Member States passed a World Health Assembly resolution that identified the following five priority areas for research and pilot projects on ...climate change and human health: health vulnerability, health protection, health impacts of mitigation and adaptation policies, decision-support and other tools, and costs of health protection from climate change. Objectives: TO assess the extent to which recently published research corresponds to these priorities, we undertook a scoping review of original research on climate change and human health. Scoping reviews address topics that are too broad for a systematic review and commonly aim to identify research gaps in existing literature. We also assessed recent publication trends for climate change and health research. Methods: We searched for original quantitative research published from 2008 onward. We included disease burden studies that were specific to climate change and health and included intervention studies that focused on climate change and measured health outcomes. We used MEDLINE, Embase, and Web of Science databases and extracted data on research priority areas, geographic regions, health fields, and equity (systematic differences between advantaged and disadvantaged social groups). Discussion: We identified 40 eligible studies. Compared with other health topics, the number of climate change publications has grown rapidly, with a larger proportion of reviews or editorials. Recent original research addressed four of the five priority areas identified by the WHO Member States, but we found no eligible studies of health adaptation interventions, and most of the studies focused on high-income countries. Conclusions: Climate change and health is a rapidly growing area of research, but quantitative studies remain rare. Among recently published studies, we found gaps in adaptation research and a deficit of studies in most developing regions. Funders and researchers should monitor and respond to research gaps to help ensure that the needs of policymakers are met.
The World Health Organization has developed standardized comparative risk assessment methods for estimating aggregate disease burdens attributable to different risk factors. These have been applied ...to existing and new models for a range of climate-sensitive diseases in order to estimate the effect of global climate change on current disease burdens and likely proportional changes in the future. The comparative risk assessment approach has been used to assess the health consequences of climate change worldwide, to inform decisions on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, and in a regional assessment of the Oceania region in the Pacific Ocean to provide more location-specific information relevant to local mitigation and adaptation decisions. The approach places climate change within the same criteria for epidemiologic assessment as other health risks and accounts for the size of the burden of climate-sensitive diseases rather than just proportional change, which highlights the importance of small proportional changes in diseases such as diarrhea and malnutrition that cause a large burden. These exercises help clarify important knowledge gaps such as a relatively poor understanding of the role of nonclimatic factors (socioeconomic and other) that may modify future climatic influences and a lack of empiric evidence and methods for quantifying more complex climate-health relationships, which consequently are often excluded from consideration. These exercises highlight the need for risk assessment frameworks that make the best use of traditional epidemiologic methods and that also fully consider the specific characteristics of climate change. These include the long-term and uncertain nature of the exposure and the effects on multiple physical and biotic systems that have the potential for diverse and widespread effects, including high-impact events.
Climate change and health in Pacific island states Kim, Rokho; Costello, Anthony; Campbell-Lendrum, Diarmid
Bulletin of the World Health Organization,
12/2015, Letnik:
93, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The health and well-being of human populations -- and the very existence of low-lying island states -- depend on an ambitious outcome at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations ...Framework Convention on Climate Change. By the 2030s -- now less than 15 years away -- approximately 250,000 additional deaths are projected to occur every year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress attributable to climate change. Climate change will disproportionally affect small island states, because of their relatively small land area, high population density and dependence on local ecosystems for subsistence. In the past five years, the World Health Organization has assisted thirteen Pacific island countries to develop national climate change and health vulnerability and impact assessments to guide health system adaptation plans.
Abstract
Since 2001, a synthesizing element in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports has been a summary of how risks in a particular system could change with additional warming ...above pre-industrial levels, generally accompanied by a figure called the burning embers. We present a first effort to develop burning embers for climate change risks for heat-related morbidity and mortality, ozone-related mortality, malaria, diseases carried by
Aedes
sp., Lyme disease, and West Nile fever. We used an evidence-based approach to construct the embers based on a comprehensive global literature review. Projected risks for these health outcomes under 1.5 °C, 2 °C, and >2 °C of warming were used to estimate at what temperatures risk levels increased from undetectable to medium, high, and very high, from the pre-industrial baseline, under three adaptation scenarios. Recent climate change has likely increased risks from undetectable to moderate for heat-related morbidity and mortality, ozone-related mortality, dengue, and Lyme disease. Recent climate change also was assessed as likely beginning to affect the burden of West Nile fever. A detectable impact of climate change on malaria is not yet apparent but is expected to occur with additional warming. The risk for each climate-sensitive health outcome is projected to increase as global mean surface temperature increases above pre-industrial levels, with the extent and pace of adaptation expected to affect the timing and magnitude of risks. The embers may be an effective tool for informing efforts to build climate-resilient health systems including through vulnerability, capacity, and adaptation assessments and the development of national adaptation plans. The embers also can be used to raise awareness of future threats from climate change and advocate for mitigation actions to reduce the overall magnitude of health risks later this century and to expand current adaptation efforts to protect populations now.
Climate change may be the greatest health threat of the twenty-first century, impacting lives both directly and indirectly, through undermining the environmental and social determinants of health. ...Rapid action to decarbonize economies and build resilience is justified on health, human rights, environmental and economic grounds. While the necessary health response is wide ranging, it can largely be encapsulated within three grand challenges: (i) promote actions that both reduce carbon emissions and improve health; (ii) build better, more climate-resilient and low-carbon health systems; and (iii) implement public health measures to protect from the range of climate risks to health. The health community can make a unique and powerful contribution, applying its trusted voice to climate leadership and advocacy, providing evidence for action, taking responsibility for climate resilience and decarbonization of healthcare systems, and guiding other sectors whose actions impact substantially on health, carbon emissions and climate resilience.
Vector-borne diseases continue to contribute significantly to the global burden of disease, and cause epidemics that disrupt health security and cause wider socioeconomic impacts around the world. ...All are sensitive in different ways to weather and climate conditions, so that the ongoing trends of increasing temperature and more variable weather threaten to undermine recent global progress against these diseases. Here, we review the current state of the global public health effort to address this challenge, and outline related initiatives by the World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners. Much of the debate to date has centred on attribution of past changes in disease rates to climate change, and the use of scenario-based models to project future changes in risk for specific diseases. While these can give useful indications, the unavoidable uncertainty in such analyses, and contingency on other socioeconomic and public health determinants in the past or future, limit their utility as decision-support tools. For operational health agencies, the most pressing need is the strengthening of current disease control efforts to bring down current disease rates and manage short-term climate risks, which will, in turn, increase resilience to long-term climate change. The WHO and partner agencies are working through a range of programmes to (i) ensure political support and financial investment in preventive and curative interventions to bring down current disease burdens; (ii) promote a comprehensive approach to climate risk management; (iii) support applied research, through definition of global and regional research agendas, and targeted research initiatives on priority diseases and population groups.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified climate change as one of the greatest health threats of the 21st century, and air pollution as the single largest environmental health risk.1 At the ...same time, noncommunicable diseases constitute the largest and fastest growing global health burden, with treatment costs placing a massive strain on government and individual resources. The scaling up of international commitment on noncommunicable diseases over the past decade had initially focused on four risk factors: tobacco use, the harmful use of alcohol, unhealthy diet and physical inactivity. Exposure to each of these risks has a strong element of personal choice, with the responsibility often placed on individual rather than on broader societal responses. However, these risks are also strongly affected by social determinants, including commodity prices, production methods, marketing and social norms, and in the case of activity levels, the physical environment. A range of other risk factors for noncommunicable diseases are even more strongly linked to environmental exposures - and to climate change.
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