World faces ‘medical emergency’

Hard-hitting report paints gloomy picture of devastating climate related health impacts

THE HEALTH effects of climate change are projected to become increasingly severe in the future, threatening to erode public health gains and development achieved in the past half century.

This is the warning from a global team of leading doctors, academics and policy professionals in a new hard-hitting report published this week in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, ahead of next week’s climate talks in Bonn, Germany.

The researchers behind the report, the Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change, say the health impacts are disproportionately felt by the world’s most vulnerable communities, the least responsible for climate change.

“The direct impacts of climate change result from rising temperatures, heatwaves and increases in the frequency of complex, extreme weather events such as wind storms, floods and droughts.

“The health and social consequences of these events are far-reaching, ranging from reduced labour productivity and heat-related deaths through to direct injury, the spread of infectious diseases, and mental health effects following widespread flooding.”

Low- and middle-income countries are “experiencing multiple impacts simultaneously”.

These are some of the alarming health impacts the researchers identified:

An average 5.3% fall in productivity for rural labour estimated globally since 2000 from rising temperatures.

The number of people exposed to heatwave events increased by about 125 million between 2000 and last year, with a record 175 million people exposed to heatwaves in 2015.

Malnutrition is the largest health impact of climate change in the 21st century, with a 6% decline in global wheat yields and 10% fall in rice yields for each additional 1°C rise in global temperature.

More than 803 000 premature and avoidable deaths happened in 2015 from air pollution across 21 Asian countries.

An increase of 3% and 5.9% in the vectorial capacity for the transmission of dengue fever, because of climate trends, by just two types of mosquitoes since 1990.

At least 1 billion people will be faced with a need to migrate within 90 years, because of a rise in sea level caused by ice-shelf collapse.

“The potential benefits (of responding to the effects) are staggering, including cleaning up the air of polluted cities, delivering more nutritious diets, ensuring energy, food and water security, and alleviating poverty, alongside social and economic inequalities.”

Responsibility for t he implementation of the Paris Agreement falls on national governments.

“The next 15 years, from 2016 to 2030, are a crucial window that will deter mine the trajectory of climate change and human development for the coming century.

“As part of this transition, countries will have to undergo a shift from understanding climate change solely as a threat to embracing the response to climate change as an opportunity for human health and wellbeing.”

The trends identified in the report “provide cause for deep concer n”, highlighting the immediate health threats from climate change and the “relative inaction” over the past 20 years, say the authors.

Last month, another Lancet report described how air, water and soil pollution is “the largest environmental cause of disease and death in the world today”, attributing to it an estimated nine million premature deaths each year.

Professor Rebecca Garland, principal researcher in the climate studies modelling and environmental health research group at the CSIR, says the health impacts of climate change do not receive enough attention.

“To be fair, the health departments across South Africa and Africa have immediate crisis to deal with and are generally overburdened and we can’t put too much blame on them,” she said.

“But this is a crisis that is coming and they probably need to be better resourced by governments to deal with it.”

Urbanisation, too, may worsen impacts in cities, she adds.

“Within cities that don’t have good service delivery… infectious diseases can spread more easily.”