Climate change and its impact on human health

Fatema Miah:

I wrote a lot about climate change issues; how the air, land and water effected by or are concern, topic of climate change. Effects are domino to all aspects for example carbondioxide or other gases I wrote about are  the main cause of effect to water, land and air therefore the disturbances caused to whole chain system. Consequencely, it’s causing suffering to living things and leads to suffering to human health.

Human health is sensitive to changes in the weather and changes in seasons and climate change is expected to contribute to further change in these drivers of health. Climate change is therefore expected to exacerbate both the existing health burden but also create new challenges for health. For example changes in the distribution and spread of infectious diseases but also influences on for example cardiovascular health and mental health. It’s estimated, there likely to be 250,000 death due to climate change between 2030 and 2050.

The most obvious effects of climate change on health occurred during natural disasters which themselves can be linked to climate change.  The heatwaves are caused more likely and can be more intense because of the effects of climate change. In 2003 the European heatwave its estimated to have killed up to 70,000 people.  Also every time we experienced one of these major weather effects like a heatwave or a flood the concern increasingly become about climate threat connected to climate change.

The climate change is not only going to be linked with these obvious impacts. There are  whole range of indirect impacts where climate change could be contributing to ill health. And about indirect impacts are things like systems where climate is having an influence within a system and  that is having an impact on health. From sea level rise it will cause water pollution and shortage of vegetation and from carbon emmission gases will cause air pollution and change in weather and both lead to health hazard.

There are some really good example of how climate change could influence on the production of food;  reduced production of food can lead to increased poverty and it can lead to micronutrient deficiencies. And this will have negative impacts on human health. Therefore, climate change impacts on health can be really broken up into a number of different categories.

As direct case, we have direct impacts like the heat wave, deaths, floods and droughts, and indirect impacts can include more complicated pathways from those changes to human health.  For an example of  drought can lead to decreased crop productions and that will cause malnutrition. Sudan and Syrian draught lead to war and migration too.  By 2030 further 170 million people are predicted to be effected by malaria in Africa.

The other area where we have very complicated impacts of climate change on health is when we move through the social determinants of health, for example infrastructure and  health care facilitation in some countries are better than in other countries and the differences can translate into the way that climate change impacts are felt from the human health perspective. Here, in London, climate change impact is felt already on the health as there is having an increased in asthma due to poor air quality.

The other thing is, of course not everyone believes climate change is a real thing. However, so far,  we have some major global agreements implaced how to tackle greenhouse gas emissions,  the most important of which is the Paris Agreement which came into effect in 2015 as I mentioned in my previous articles, almost all countries around the world agreed with IPCC to do something substantial about cutting emissions in order to reduce the impact of climate change.

The ambition is to limit global warming to within two degrees of the pre-industrial average with an ambition of one and a half degrees.  There all major and main carbon emission accumulating countries and nations need to co-operate  to cut down on carbon emission. Further, there are ocean acidification issues raised and solution have been sort by IPCC, I wrote in my Ocean acidification and climate solution article. Ocean acidification effecting the marine lives and posing threat to human lives too.

To protect marine world there international and global cooperation must be implied to tackle the acidification to prevent further health hazard. The children, elderly and those living in poverty are the most vulnerable and prone to health risk from the climate threat. .  Fatema Miah, Solihull, uk. [email protected]