Climate change affecting global health
GS 3 | climate change
Why is the world’s reliance on fossil fuels increasing the prevalence of disease, food insecurity and other illnesses related to heat? According to a Lancet report, how are changing weather events impacting lives? What action is required to stop the crisis from causing further damage?
News : Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt and a recent report by Lancet, has traced in detail the intimate link between changing weather events and their impact on the health of people. The 2022 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Health at the Mercy of Fossil Fuels points out that the world’s reliance on fossil fuels increases the risk of disease, food insecurity and other illnesses related to heat.
What does the report outline?
v The deleterious effects of climate change not only have the potential to severely disrupt life. Climate change is not an isolated incident or occurrence, but a global phenomenon, leaving its impact on almost every aspect of life, sweeping in its train nations across the world, irrespective of whether they contributed to it or not.
v The 2022 Lancet Countdown report comes at a time when the world is face-to-face with the threat of climate change.
Ø Countries and health systems continue to contend with the health, social, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and persistent fossil fuel overdependence has pushed the world into global energy and cost-of-living crises. As these crises unfold, climate change escalates unabated.
Ø Its worsening impacts are increasingly affecting the foundations of human health and wellbeing, exacerbating the vulnerability of the world’s populations to concurrent health threats.
Ø The Lancet report indicates that rapidly increasing temperatures exposed people, especially vulnerable populations (adults above 65 years old and children younger than one) to 3.7 billion more heatwave days in 2021 than annually in 1986–2005.
v According to the World Health Organization (WHO), climate change affects the social and environmental determinants of health — clean air, safe drinking water, sufficient food and secure shelter.
How is it leading to rise in infectious diseases?
v The changing climate is affecting the spread of infectious disease, raising the risk of emerging diseases and co-epidemics. For instance, it records that coastal waters are becoming more suited for the transmission of Vibrio pathogens.
v It also says that the number of months suitable for malaria transmission has increased in the highland areas of the Americas and Africa.
v The WHO has predicted that between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 2,50,000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.
Food security
v Every dimension of food security is being affected by climate change. Higher temperatures threaten crop yields directly, with the growth season shortening for many cereal crops.
v Extreme weather events disrupt supply chains, thereby undermining food availability, access, stability, and utilisation.
v The prevalence of undernourishment increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and up to 161 million more people faced hunger in 2020 than in 2019. This situation is now worsened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the report underscores.
Is the world dependent on fossil fuel?
v The war has led many countries to search for alternative fuels to Russian oil and gas, and some of them are still turning back to traditional thermal energy.
v The report argues that even if implemented as a temporary transition, the renewed clamour for coal could reverse whatever gains have been made in air quality improvement and push the world towards a future of accelerated climate change that would threaten human survival.
Solutions
1) A health-centred response to the coexisting climate, energy, and cost-of-living crises provides an opportunity to deliver a healthy, low-carbon future.
2) Measuring the rising coverage of health and climate change in the media, the governments’ commitment to assess and address the threats from climate change, are positive signs.
3) While improving energy security and creating an opportunity for economic recovery. Improvements in air quality will help prevent deaths resulting from exposure to fossil fuel-derived ambient PM2.5, and the stress on low-carbon travel and increase in urban spaces would result in promoting physical activity which would have an impact on physical and mental health.
4) The report also calls for an accelerated transition to balanced and more plant-based diets, as that would help reduce emissions from red meat and milk production, and prevent diet-related deaths, besides substantially reducing the risk of zoonotic diseases.
5) The report indicates that this sort of health-focused shifts would reduce the burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases, reducing the strain on health-care providers, and leading to more robust health systems.
In this context, the report calls for global coordination, funding, transparency, and cooperation between governments, communities, civil society, businesses, and public health leaders, to reduce or prevent the vulnerabilities that the world is otherwise exposed to.