The choking air pollution of drought and wildfire. The threat of climate-driven diseases ravages communities around the world. A threefold increase in the chance of another global pandemic like the COVID-19 outbreak. These are just a few ways that public health has been impacted and compounded by artificial climate change – a focus for the first time at the annual U.N. climate summit COP28 in DUBAI. The meeting is expected to discuss ways to protect people from these threats, threatening to undo decades of progress in public health.
Those most vulnerable to climate change are poor people, Indigenous communities, and people with preexisting medical conditions who are already living in a warmer world that’s on track to warm up even faster than the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius. And they’re facing climate-related disasters and disease and a lack of access to essential services such as clean water and food.
Heat stress makes it harder for the body to keep cool, increasing the risk of strokes and heart attacks. Wildfire smoke is a significant public health hazard because it contains fine particulates that are so small they can go deep into the lungs. The lungs’ normal filtering cells can’t handle them and can trigger respiratory infections like the flu.
A warmer world is also more likely to cause droughts and floods that disrupt food security, kill livestock, and wash away vital infrastructure. This robs people of the nutrients they need for good health, increasing the risk of disease-carrying mosquitoes infecting more people with malaria and dengue fever. Changes in temperatures and rain patterns also affect the geography of insect-borne diseases.
These new climate risks are not going to disappear. Experts say they will get worse. From 2030 onwards, they will push the global death toll from just four climate-driven threats – malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, and heat stress – up by about 250,000 deaths each year. But we need to start dealing with the root causes to stop these threats.
That means getting the world off fossil fuels and fast. It’s not enough to meet the Paris Agreement targets if we continue to rely on oil, coal, and gas. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that we must eliminate these pollutants to save the planet, limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and avoid the worst effects of climate change.
At COP28, countries are discussing ways to make renewable energy cheaper and more accessible, fast-tracking the development of green jobs, and investing in nature-based solutions that benefit human health and biodiversity. They are also negotiating the details of a long-awaited “loss and damage” fund to help nations whose citizens have been devastated by climate-related disasters while challenging, rich nations whose past carbon emissions caused climate change to fulfill their pledged contributions. But the real test will come outside the COP halls, where activists will demand that wealthy nations not stall their commitments to tackle climate change.
