Blog
Climate Change and Health
Guest Blogger
Monday, June 08, 2009
MARY GANT: Mankind is totally dependent on the Earth's natural systems for the essentials of life - air, water, food, and shelter. Over the coming decades, global climate change will have a significant impact on our atmosphere, marine, and terrestrial ecosystems, and their ability to provide these essential elements. For some, e.g., the millions of people who live less than a meter above sea level or who eke out a living in already arid environments, the impact may be catastrophic.
The health consequences of climate change include disease (both physical and mental), injury, and the misery of poverty and dislocation:
* An increased frequency or severity of heat waves would cause an increase in cardiorespiratory diseases and mortality. The elderly and very young children would be most at risk.
* Extreme weather events (hurricanes, torrential rains, tornados, etc.) would occur more often and with greater intensity resulting in disruptions in locally available food, clean water, and shelter, in serious injury and death, and in devastating economic loss.
* Some regions of the world will become drier and plagued by serious drought forcing changes in agricultural, animal, and fisheries productivity and overall water usage. Drought may also increase the risk of meningitis in some regions.
* Sea level rise above various thresholds in different parts of the world will result in adverse impacts on economy, infrastructure, and resources, especially fresh water, and may force migrations and crowding with an increase risk of disease, psychological disorders, and injury.
* Increases in temperature and longer warm periods without frost will increase the ranges, numbers, and seasons for vectors that carry diseases, such as dengue, malaria, West Nile, Lyme, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and encephalitis. When temperatures rise, mosquitoes breed and mature more rapidly.
* Increased air pollution, especially ozone, would increase asthma and other acute and chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
* Increases in pollens and spores would exacerbate allergic disorders, especially asthma.
* The production and use of alternative fuels (methane, ethanol, biomass, etc.) calls for understanding the health effects of their emissions and exposures and other economic and environmental consequences.
* New technologies to mitigate or adapt to climate change may entail exposures during their manufacture, use, and disposal to materials and compounds whose health effects are little understood.
* The health consequences of the loss of biodiversity could be enormous. The alteration of the Earth's ecosystems and declines in species diversity could result in an irreversible loss in human well-being.
All of the impacts of climate change demand the attention of federal, state, and local officials and the public to provide the research to understand more fully these impacts and to develop the strategies to cope with them.
Learn how you can start preventing climate change today by taking simple steps in your home.
Mary Gant is Program Analyst for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of Healthy Child Healthy World.
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