A new report, “Managing the health effects of climate change," published in The Lancet UCL (Vol. 373: 693-733, May 16, 2009) by an interdisciplinary team of academics in the U.K., is now available. Representing a year of research, it finds that the cumulative effects of climate change represent the greatest threat to human health throughout the world. The report is a collaborative effort among research teams from health, anthropology, geography, engineering, political science, economics, law and philosophy. Its lead author, pediatrician Anthony Costello, is a professor of international child health and also director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London.
The challenge is unprecedented, and is one that needs to be seen as the greatest public health and environmental issue. Their report is written in a strong spirit of moral engagement, too, and raises the issue of intergenerational justice. The authors state that the health community has yet to be heard from on the multiple impacts on human health of greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation, the extreme geographic and socio-economic disparity of those impacts, and how adaptation to low-carbon lifestyles will reduce obesity, heart and lung disease, diabetes and stress as well as ameliorate those impacts. They call for a new public health movement to deal with climate change, one that makes the general public aware of the benefits of adapting to it as well as the costs to all nations of not doing so. The authors propose that a coalition of health experts set priorities for management, implementation, and monitoring of the health effects of climate change within two years.
A related editorial in the The Lancet calls for “a new public health advocacy movement… to usher in an unprecedented era of cooperation between widely divergent, but utterly connected, spheres — disease, food, water and sanitation, shelter and settlements, extreme events, and population and migration.”
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation as Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death, they also symbolize exactly what is to be expected from unmitigated climate change. It is estimated that by the year 2000 — the most recent year the calculation was made — the world’s population had lost 5.5 million years of life due to premature death and quality of life reductions by disability. These include deaths caused by heart disease, diarrhea, malaria, malnutrition, and injury from coastal flooding and landslides, all attributable to climate change. Identifying where those effects disproportionately occurred further highlights the “massive inequality in health systems.” For example, the loss of healthy life-years as a result of climate change is predicted to be 500 times higher in Africa, a continent that makes minimal contributions to exacerbate climate change, than in European nations.
In April, Oxfam issued a report, The Right to Survive: The humanitarian challenge for the 21st century, stating that 250 million people a year are currently adversely affected by climate change-related disasters, and predicting that the number would rise to 375 million by 2015.
For our own Environmental Protection Agency’s take on this important issue, visit http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/.