Climate change threatens human lives – WHO

CLIMATE change is impacting on human lives and health in a variety of ways, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said, as it threatens the essential ingredients of good health – clean air, safe drinking water, nutritious food supply and safe shelter.

Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause about 250 000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone, the organisation said.

Areas with weak health infrastructure, which are mostly in developing countries, will be the least able to cope without assistance to prepare and respond.

The WHO said it supports countries in building climate-resilient health systems and tracking national progress in protecting health from climate change.

“Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases through better transport, food and energy-use choices can result in improved health, particularly through reduced air pollution.

“The Paris Climate Agreement is therefore potentially the strongest health agreement of this century.

“The WHO supports countries in assessing the health gains that would result from the implementation of the existing Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement, and the potential for larger gains from more ambitious climate action,” it said.

Plastic is considered a major contributing factor to pollution, which in turn impacts on the climate.

Break Free From Plastic and the Heinrich Böll Foundation in their first jointly published Plastic Atlas, released recently, found that over 400 million tons of plastic are produced globally each year, with packaging accounting for more than a third of all plastics produced.

The Atlas highlighted the scale of pollution, and the global impacts of plastic production, consumption and disposal.

Among the findings is that between 1950 and 2017, a total of 9.2 billion tons of plastic were produced.

The biggest share consists of single-use products and packaging.

It also found that while plastic waste and microplastics floating in the world’s oceans are a problem, plastic pollution of the soil can be between 4 and 23 times higher than in the seas.

“Every year some 10 million tons of plastic waste enter the oceans from land: equivalent to a truckload every minute.

“Plastics that end up in the sea tend to concentrate in five enormous gyres: in the north and south Pacific, the north and south Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean.

“The gyre in the North Pacific, popularly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, is the most famous. But contrary to common perceptions, these are not areas of consolidated plastic waste: rather they are merely where the concentration of waste is highest.

“In reality, microplastics are widely distributed in all aquatic environments worldwide: they form a plastic smog, like air pollution over large cities,” the Atlas read.

Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases can result in improved health World Health Organisation