‘Health toll rising’
Report warns of need to prioritise health in response to climate crisis
FROM THE sweltering heat to destroyed natural and human systems as well as billions of dollars in economic losses due to impaired livelihoods, the health toll of climate change is rising.
This is according to the 2023 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: the imperative for a health-centred response in a world facing irreversible harms. The Lancet Countdown is a global research collaboration that undertakes independent monitoring of health impacts of climate change as well as health opportunities for climate action.
“In 2023, the world saw the highest global temperatures in over 100,000 years, and heat records were broken in all continents through 2022. Adults older than 65 years and infants younger than one year, for whom extreme heat can be particularly life-threatening, are now exposed to twice as many heat wave days as they would have experienced in 1986-2005,” the report revealed.
“Harnessing the rapidly advancing science of detection and attribution, new analysis shows that over 60 per cent of the days that reached healththreatening high temperature sin 2020 were made more than twice as likely to occur due to anthropogenic climate change. [This is while] heatrelated deaths of people older than 65 years increased by 85 per cent compared with 1990-2000, substantially higher than the 38 per cent increase that would have been expected had temperatures not changed,” it added.
On the damage to natural and human systems on which people rely for good health, the report – which is informed by the expertise of some 114 scientists and health practitioners across 52 research institutions and United Nations agencies – said that “the global land area affected by extreme drought increased from 18 per cent in 1951-1960 to 47 per cent in 2013-2022, jeopardising water security, sanitation, and food production”.
At the same time, it noted that “a higher frequency of heat waves and droughts in 2021 was associated with 127 million more people experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity compared with 1981-2010”.
The result is that millions have been put at risk of malnutrition and potentially irreversible health effects.
“The changing climatic conditions are also putting more populations at risk of life-threatening infectious diseases, such as dengue, malaria, vibriosis, and West Nile virus. Compounding these direct health impacts, the economic losses associated with global heating increasingly harm livelihoods, limit resilience, and restrict the funds available to tackle climate change,” the report explained.
As for the economic losses, they are tangible. Economic loss from extreme weather events, for example, is reported to have increased by 23 per cent between 2010-14 and 2018-22, “amounting to US$264 billion in 2022 alone”. Heat exposure, meanwhile, “led to global potential income losses worth $863 billion”.
The report has therefore encouraged the prioritisation of urgent health-promoting climate action.
“The multiple and simultaneously rising risks of climate change are amplifying global health inequities and threatening the very foundations of human health,” it noted.
Among the suggestions for a response is a move away from treating the health symptoms of climate change to focus on primary prevention.
“Averting the worst impacts of climate change requires profound and immediate systemic changes, many with the potential to improve the health profile of world populations. To enable a healthy future, these changes must go beyond the treatment of the health symptoms of climate change, to put particular focus on primary prevention and rapidly accelerating mitigation efforts across all sectors, and ensure that climate change impacts stay within the bounds of the adaptive capacity of health and health-supporting systems, ”the report said.
Also important are health-centred adaptation efforts.
“Health-centred adaptation efforts are equally necessary to minimise the effects of now inevitable temperature rise on human health and survival and, by strengthening health and health-supporting systems, will have rippling benefits to public health. However, realising these health gains requires that human health and survival be central considerations in how international organisations, governments, corporations, and individuals understand and address climate change,” the report said.