The Health Implications of Climate Change

The latest installment of the Washington Post’s In the Greenhouse: Confronting a Changing Climate series zooms in on the potential impacts of climate change on human health. While predictions of these impacts are often crude and at times contradictory, the effects of global warming will likely be detrimental to health on balance. During the last quarter of the 20th century, average atmospheric temperature rose by 1 degree, which by 2000 accounted for the annual loss of 160,000 lives and the loss of 5.5 million years of healthy life, according to the WHO. By 2020, these numbers are expected to rise to 300,000 lives and 11 million years of healthy life. These tolls have been (and will be) felt disproportionately in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, largely as a result of malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, heat waves, and floods. Nonetheless, many other regions will also feel the effects of climate change on health outcomes, effects that researchers put into five categories:

• Heat stress
• Extreme weather
• Air pollution
• Waterborne and food-borne disease
• Vector-borne disease

Many believe that the U.S. is lagging behind Europe in terms of “designing and developing adaptations that will decrease our vulnerability and increase our resilience.” Meanwhile, this type of planning cannot be limited to the federal government; there is also a critical role to be played by local actors in minimizing the negative health consequences of climate change. To see a visual depiction of these health effects, click here.