Climate Change Affects Human Health – A Stanford report last fall gave the new president of the United States comprehensive recommendations to mitigate the severe impacts of climate change on human health.
The map shows an estimate of the number of days different parts of the United States can expect temperatures to exceed 100 degrees by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise unabated.
Climate Change Affects Human Health
A farm worker dies in 109-degree heat in a California lemon grove in 2015. In Missouri, hospitalizations for heat-related illnesses soared in 2006, a year of unusually high temperatures.
Chapter 1: Climate Change And Human Health
And since the arrival of Asian tiger mosquitoes in Memphis in 1983, the insects — capable of spreading Zika, dengue and West Nile virus — have invaded 37 states. In the densely populated northeast, Asian tiger mosquitoes are likely to triple their range before 2045 – doubling the number of people potentially exposed to these diseases from 18 million to more than 30 million.
But we are not powerless in the face of such threats, according to a recent report co-authored by Stanford University researchers. A few weeks before the 2016 election, the authors presented the report to the two presidential transition teams. Titled “Health: The Human Face of Climate Change, Perspective and Recommendations for the Next US President,” the report recommended that a future administration begin a formal, decade-long emergency response to climate change, administered by the US State Department, and frame. climate change as a global health problem, in other words, an acute public health threat to populations around the world.
The report “The Human Face of Climate Change” was one of a series of 14 climate reports that emerged from a 2016 Stanford conference titled “Setting the Climate Agenda for the Next U.S. President.”
One of the report’s three authors, Katherine Burke, MM, MSc, deputy director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford, said when she and her co-authors set out to write the report, they thought it was an extraordinary opportunity. to have an impact. Her co-authors are Michele Barry, MD, a Stanford ice cream professor and director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health; and Diana Chapman Walsh, PhD, senior adviser to the center and president emerita of Wellesley College.
Direct And Indirect Health Impacts Of Climate Change On The Vulnerable Elderly Population In East China
While the report has received no response from President Trump or his administration, the advice it contains still provides a valuable framework for addressing climate change and health, Walsh said.
Experts agree that the Earth is warming dangerously and that this warming is due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities. The damage from ecosystem disruption, rising sea levels and increasingly intense storms are all well documented. This is also increasingly true of the rapidly changing climate effects on human health.
Both higher average temperatures and scorching heat waves have similar effects on morbidity and mortality from heat-related illnesses such as heat stroke and heat exhaustion. “The one thing that is clearest is the impact of rising ambient temperatures,” says Mark Cullen, MD, a professor of film and biodata science. “With every degree Celsius increase in high summer temperatures, there is a predictable increase in total mortality.”
Cullen, who did not contribute to the report but is a public health expert, added: “Most of it is a ‘crop function’ like flu, meaning less often it’s perfectly healthy people who suffer or die; it is precisely people with other chronic diseases who are at risk of dying earlier during heat waves.”
Human Health Impacts Of Climate Change
In addition, healthy people who normally work outside during the heat of the day can get sick or even die from extreme heat. Agricultural workers, road workers and roofers are among the risk groups. In a warmer world, the number of days when it is too hot to work safely outside is expected to increase dramatically. Places like Texas, which once had temperatures of more than 100 degrees 10 to 20 days a year, could see more than 100 a year by the end of the century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Infectious diseases will also worsen as disease vectors such as mosquitoes and ticks multiply and spread. And climate change has hundreds of other indirect effects on health. For example, our livestock and chickens are just as vulnerable as we are to temperatures in excess of 100 degrees that last for more and more days or weeks.
Ocean warming and acidification are combining to kill coral reefs and collapse marine fisheries, the primary food source for some 2 billion people in Asia and the Pacific. Valuable agricultural land around the world is threatened by drought or, in places like Bangladesh, inundation by rising seas and floods.
“If your food basket doesn’t produce, your city will be in big trouble,” Burke said.
Selected Indicators On The Effects Of Climate Change On The Environment And Human Health
The effects of the shattered food supplies spread outward, causing economic hardship, social unrest, food shortages and the displacement and forced migration of millions. This in turn leads to violence, trauma and physical and mental health problems.
For example, an extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 – which experts say was due to climate change – caused massive crop failures, which in turn led to the migration of 1.5 million people from farms to cities. Such displacement played a role in the subsequent uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, experts say.
The healthcare community already recognizes that detecting, studying and addressing the health impacts of climate change is critical to strengthening the resilience of societies around the world.
The graph shows some of the expected health effects of climate change due to deteriorating air quality.
Human Mobility, Climate Change, And Health: Unpacking The Connections
Many institutions have started integrated programs to consolidate what is known and what questions need to be answered. For example, The Lancet, an ical journal, created an international research collaboration called “Lancet Countdown: Tracking progress on health and climate change.”
The American Public Health Association—a 25,000-member organization of public health professionals—has declared 2017 the Year of Climate Change and Health. And in March, The New England Journal of Icine published a call for the administration to stay on track on climate change and health.
The Stanford report recommends the creation of a State Department-based Presidential Emergency Response to Climate Change, conceptually similar to the 2003 Presidential AIDS Emergency Response Plan, which has saved millions of lives. The impact of climate change on human health is similar to that of the AIDS epidemic, says Walsh, one of the report’s three co-authors. “Climate change poses a major threat to humanity, a threat to global security and a threat to health. We need to see it on that scale,” she said.
With a budget of $90 billion over 10 years, the report’s authors suggested, a federal climate change and health program could develop initiatives including a global climate health surveillance system; vulnerability maps and tools to create forecasts and early warning programs; climate change adaptation plans; the integration of health science and climate science; and ways to increase the resilience of high-risk countries to infectious diseases and water insecurity.
Chapter 9: Populations Of Concern
Switching to renewable energy is also on the table. Hospitals in the United States are second only to restaurants in the intensity of their energy use. The Stanford report recommended reducing carbon emissions from the health sector by providing it with renewable energy and increasing energy efficiency, as well as making hospitals and clinics more resilient to storms.
The report also recommended framing climate change as a human health problem—partly because it is a health problem and partly to better engage the public and health care system in action that will slow the underlying cause.
The graph shows some of the expected effects of climate change on diseases transmitted by vectors such as mosquitoes and ticks.
Americans recognize that climate change is a major threat, Burke said. But the subject lacks imacy, and it’s often low on people’s list of concerns. Talking about current health impacts is one way to gain public support for action. “It’s no longer something abstract” — not vague about the health of future generations, Burke said. ‘It is now. They are our own children and grandchildren; they grow up in a completely different world.”
The Rising Impact Of Climate Change On Human Health
At a recent climate policy meeting, California Air Resources Board Chief Economist Emily Wimberger said that when it comes to action, people respond most quickly to immediate threats to human health and safety. People who don’t necessarily want to talk about climate change, she said, will pay more attention to the issue when it comes to keeping everyone healthy. For example, while California is reducing fossil fuel use, CARB sees the problem as a way to slow climate change and also as a health-oriented reduction in smog — one that lowers population risks for asthma, heart disease and dementia.
Experts agree that addressing the health aspects of climate change is not up to the federal government; this can happen at the level of cities, states, local governments, companies or institutions, but also through regional partnerships. “It’s not game over yet; it’s game on,” Wimberger said.
Hospitals and health care systems have a number of specific challenges to address, according to the Stanford report. “In a crisis like a deadly heat wave
What affects climate change, affects of climate change, climate change affects animals, climate change affects biodiversity, how climate change affects human health, agriculture affects climate change, climate change affects, climate change human health, climate change disproportionately affects, climate change affects health, deforestation affects climate change, climate change affects humans