Action on climate change: the health risks of procrastinating

Abstract

Objective: The world's climate will continue to change because of human influence. This is expected to affect health, mostly adversely. We need to compare the

Co-Benefits of Climate Mitigation and Health Protection in Energy Systems: Scoping Methods

“…The prospect for large changes in the energy sector to mitigate 2 GHG emissions and the close connection with health in some parts of the sector raise a set of concerns for public health (22,44,76). One concern is that actions should not just shift the hazards from one population to another, e.g., shift the health burden from coal burning to a potentially even higher burden from nuclear accidents.…”

Climate Change and Population Health: Possible Future Scenarios

“…In Australia, by 2100, if no effective policy and public health measures have been developed, the zone of potential transmission of dengue fever may expand 1,800 kilometres south, as far as Sydney. In contrast, by markedly constraining greenhouse gas emissions immediately, this southward extension could be limited to 600 km (Woodruff et al, 2006). In terms of the relationship between RRV infections and climate variability, studies found that variations in rainfall, temperature and tides have been positively associated with the incidence of RRV infections (Harley et al, 2001;Tong et al, 2002).…”

Preparing the U.S. Health Community for Climate Change

“…Gleaning such evidence is challenging in the early stages of such research owing to high signal-to-noise ratios, and there is a pressing need to develop patternrecognition methods applicable to such scenarios. The third research needed is to make credible estimates of future changes in the health risks due to plausible scenarios of ongoing changes in large environmental systems (4,104). Other specific research goals, including the need to (a) develop innovative approaches to analyze weather and climate in relation to health, (b) set up long-term data sets to answer key questions, and (c) improve our understanding of how to incorporate outputs from global climate models into human health studies, are discussed in detail in References 11,32,33,60,63,66,67,and 83. Research must be coupled with leadership in order to achieve measurable success.…”