WHAT DOES CLIMATE CHANGE MEAN FOR PUBLIC HEALTH?

Projections for the global environment under a changed climate pose many threats to public health:

• More heat-related illness

• Greater risk of infectious diseases

• Worsening air quality

• Rising sea levels threatening populations and infrastructure

• More accidents and injuries from increased flooding, storm surge, and extreme weather events

• Threatened food supplies

• Potentially hundreds of millions of environmental refugees threatening global security and further stressing global resources

• Threatened quantity and quality of water supplies

• Stressed ecosystems, potential for collapse, and loss of ecosystem services

Although heat-related illness and insect-borne infectious diseases like malaria and West Nile Virus typically come to mind when people think about “health” and “climate change”, the remaining topics in the list are likely to be more important in terms of numbers of people affected and contribution to overall health and well-being of people from a global perspective.

This talk will touch briefly on the public health implications of each of these topics and then focus on discussing the potentially staggering implications of the availability of clean water under a changed climate. Two billion people currently live in water-stressed countries. By 2025, that number is expected to increase to five billion. In most years, drought and famine contribute to more than half of all deaths from natural disasters and 1.8 million people, mostly children, already die every year from diarrheal diseases caused by drinking contaminated water. Climate change is expected to further compromise existing water resources.