Climate Change Health Risks Will Hit The Poor Hardest – So What Can Be Done?

The Conversation - Bob Mash

The livelihood of this fishing community in Nigeria is being threatened as a result of climate change. Reuters/Akintunde Akinleye 

Discussions about climate change and the effects it will have on public health and the global burden of disease have been long in the making. These consequences are now starting to come to fore.
Several examples have recently played out. For example, in Russia, an anthrax outbreak in the remote region of Siberia meant that nomadic communities and thousands of reindeer were affected. The outbreak was due to the bodies of infected people buried in 1941 defrosting and releasing anthrax spores into the water system as the permafrost defrosts with global warming.
Closer to home, prisoners are starving in Malawian jails and suffering from acute severe malnutrition as a result of food shortages due to erratic climate conditions from both droughts and floods. Malawi has since declared a state of national disaster.
These unanticipated public health consequences of unsustainable development reminds the world that the issues are not in the distant future, but instead face us now.
Climate change exerts its influence on public health through three main mechanisms.
First, the effects of extreme weather events such as heat, storms, floods or fire that directly cause loss of life or illness.
Second, there are indirect effects of climate change on natural systems. This leads to, for example, changes in disease vectors such as mosquitoes that spread malaria, availability of fresh water, crop survival, or the concentration of pollen in the air.
Third, the effects on economic and social systems as people migrate or conflict over scarce resources.
These effects can be moderated by the presence of early warning systems and effective disaster and emergency medical services.
More affluent communities with more resources will be better able to adapt and withstand these effects. Having strong primary healthcare systems will also increase the resilience of communities.

But in sub-Saharan Africa many communities do not have these protective mechanisms in place, and will be particularly vulnerable to the impact of climate change.

Electricity pylons in front of cooling towers at the Lethabo Thermal Power Station, an Eskom coal-burning power station near Sasolburg in the northern Free State province. Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko

Disease and environmental health
The World Health Organisation has recently published a new report on the burden of disease due to modifiable environmental risks. The report estimates that 23% of all deaths globally can be attributed to environmental risks. This percentage rises to 26% in children.
These environmental risks include:

• air, water and soil pollution;
• ultraviolet radiation;
• the built environment;
• the occupational environment;
• agricultural methods; and
• climate and ecosystem changes.

Children, the elderly, and those living in low- and middle-income countries are most at risk.
The diseases that make the greatest environmentally attributable contribution to the global burden of disease are stroke, ischaemic heart disease, diarrhoea, lower respiratory tract infection, cancers and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. And over the last ten years the contribution of non-communicable diseases has significantly increased.
An example in South Africa is from Mpumalanga’s Highveld, which has 12 coal fired power stations. The collective air pollution from these power stations has been reported as being responsible for just over half of the deaths from respiratory disease and cardiovascular disease in the area.


Living differently
Sustainable development has been defined as:

… development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals recognise that improving the wellbeing and health of people requires an approach that protects the planet from degradation. This is required because there are ecological limits to development that is based on ever-increasing consumption.
But the climate crisis is just one of the manifestations of the world’s collective inability to live sustainably.
There is also a loss of ecosystems and the biodiversity. This compromises the natural services they render to humanity: food, fresh water, clean air, building materials and even new medicines.
Economic inequality is increasing. It is reported that 62 people now own as much wealth as 50% of the planet’s population.
At the same time, we have seen unprecedented population growth and increasing urbanisation that is characterised by the growth of slums or informal settlements.

The 21st-century challenge
Humanity’s biggest challenge in the 21st century may be its ability to find a way of living sustainably and to tackle the crises of both planetary and public health. This will require action on a global scale by world leaders and by a change in collective consciousness.
There are some encouraging signs. Brazil has joined China and the US in ratifying the Paris agreement on tackling climate change. China and the US are responsible for 38% of global emissions.
World religious leaders have also joined forces to promote a change of consciousness as part of a “season of creation”.
It can be summed up in the video message from Pope Francis, who says the relationship between poverty and the fragility of the planet requires another way of managing the economy and measuring progress, conceiving a new way of life.

Links

• Hard Evidence: will climate change affect the spread of tropical diseases?
• Why climate change is very bad for your health
• Worldwide, climate change is worse news for women
• Not so cheap: Australia needs to acknowledge the real cost of coal

Was That Climate Change? Scientists Are Getting Faster At Linking Extreme Weather To Warming

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn

Attribution studies are letting researchers respond quickly to questions about human influence – before the news cycle turns elsewhere

Leslie Andermann Gallagher surveys the flood damage to her home in Sorrento, Louisiana, in August. A team of scientists have been able to conclude that human-caused climate change had probably doubled the chance of the state being hit by such a downpour. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Is it still true to say you can’t point to any single extreme weather event and claim you can’t link it to human-caused climate change?
Plenty of people seem to think this is still the case. But a rapidly evolving field of climate science suggests that it’s not.
Take Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, for example, who was touring Tasmania after the devastating flooding there in June.
Turnbull pointed out that “larger and more frequent storms” were predicted by climate scientists, but then followed up with that stock standard caveat:

But you cannot attribute any particular storm to global warming, so let’s be quite clear about that. The same scientists would agree with that point.

 But in fact, climate scientists are finding ways to examine the influence of increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere on extreme events.
This is a field of science called attribution research. Dr Andrew King, at the University of Melbourne, has been involved with several attribution studies.
So is it time to throw out that old stock response that you can’t blame climate change for any single event? He says:

I would reframe the question – has climate change altered the likelihood of an event happening, like a flood in Louisiana or a heatwave in Melbourne? We can usually say with those types of events that climate change has increased the likelihood of an event happening.

When extreme weather events do strike, questions about human influences are coming up more and more. Some scientists want to be able to respond quickly with more relevant answers, before the news cycle turns elsewhere.
For example, King joined colleagues to look at the record warm sea temperatures that caused the mass bleaching of corals on the Great Barrier Reef last summer. The results were out in April while the reef’s plight was still making headlines.
“We found that the warm sea temperatures were made at least 175 times more likely because of climate change,” King says.
To carry out the research, King looked at two sets of climate models. One was set up to reproduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that we have now and the other had those human influences removed.
In short, the models showed the kind of conditions that eventually killed about a quarter of the corals on the reef are now expected to come around once every four years. But in a world without the extra greenhouse gases, you might expect to see those ocean temperatures once every 1,000 years, if at all.
The reef research is about to be submitted to a journal and so the results could change. But King says the methods being used had been peer-reviewed.
King also looked at the heatwave that had world leaders sweating during the November 2014 G20 summit in Brisbane. Getting a 38C day in November was “at least 44% more likely” thanks to climate change, his study found.
From torrential downpours to record ocean temperatures, heatwaves and the monotonous breaking of monthly and yearly global temperature records, more and more studies are finding a distinct human fingerprint on events.
There have been a bunch of attribution studies looking at heat records in Australia. A study of its consecutive run of record warm springs in 2013 and 2014 found it would have been almost impossible without all that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Another study found that without the added greenhouse gases, Australia’s record hot 2013 would only have come along once every 12,000 years. But now, thanks chiefly to the burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution, we might expect a record breaker every six years.
Dr Sophie Lewis, at Australian National University, was involved in both those studies. She says climate attribution is a “fast-evolving field” thanks to quicker computers, better collaborations and established methods.
But like King she’s not a fan of simply asking if climate change “caused” something, or was “to blame” for particular events. She says:

A better question is to ask if climate change has influenced a particular event. That’s an important distinction.

An example she gave is 2015 – the planet’s warmest year on record that coincided with an El Niño climate system.
El Niños are natural events that tends to deliver hotter temperatures, but they are happening over the top of human-induced warming that pushes temperatures to record-breaking levels. Lewis says:

We know that both natural and human-caused climate change have impacts on events and we don’t want to lose that complexity. People do understand that the environment and the climate system are complicated.

Speed counts
Getting results out faster gives the media, the public and policymakers more informed answers soon after events hit.
In early August, for example, Louisiana was struck by torrential rains that caused severe flooding – killing 13 people and damaging about 60,000 homes. Less than a month later, a team of scientists concluded that human-caused climate change had probably doubled the chances of Louisiana being hit by downpours like that.
The lead author of that study, Dr Karin van der Wiel, of Princeton University and the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me:

Extreme events have always happened and this could have happened a hundred years ago. But it would have been much more rare.

Van der Wiel says researchers managed to carry out the analysis quickly because the data from the climate models was readily available and they had good had rainfall data for the area.
The Louisiana study has been submitted to a journal where the peer-review process happens out in the open so, again, the conclusions could change.
Now, some scientists are uneasy about research being publicised before it has been through peer review, for obvious reasons. What if, for example, there’s a mistake in the analysis that completely changes the conclusions?
Both Van Der Wiel and King say they can have a degree of confidence in their results because the methods have already been tested. I’ll leave you with King’s thoughts on this.

As far as I see it, one purpose of event attribution is to communicate to the public and policy makers that climate change is altering how extreme events are occurring – both their frequency and how bad they are.
That’s why we’re moving towards doing this work more quickly. If we can better inform the debate, then that provides some useful information that’s grounded in science, when often there has been just speculation.

Links

• Our best shot at cooling the planet might be right under our feet
• Analysis Debunking Malcolm Roberts: the case against a climate science denier
• Great Barrier Reef bleaching made 175 times likelier by human-caused climate change, say scientists
• Fossil fuel emissions behind Australia's record-breaking spring heat, suggests study

Climate Change 'Significant And Direct' Threat To U.S. Military: Reports

Reuters - Idrees Ali

Sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington man the rails as the ship pulls out of Hong Kong. REUTERS/U.S. Navy

The effects of climate change endanger U.S. military operations and could increase the danger of international conflict, according to three new documents endorsed by retired top U.S. military officers and former national security officials.
"There are few easy answers, but one thing is clear: the current trajectory of climatic change presents a strategically-significant risk to U.S. national security, and inaction is not a viable option," said a statement published on Wednesday by the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington-based think tank.
It was signed by more than a dozen former senior military and national security officials, including retired General Anthony Zinni, former commander of the U.S. Central Command, and retired Admiral Samuel Locklear, head of the Pacific Command until last year.
They called on the next U.S. president to create a cabinet level position to deal with climate change and its impact on national security.
A separate report by a panel of retired military officials, also published on Wednesday by the Center for Climate and Security, said more frequent extreme weather is a threat to U.S. coastal military installations.
"The complex relationship between sea level rise, storm surge and global readiness and responsiveness must be explored down to the operational level, across the Services and Joint forces, and up to a strategic level as well," the report said.
Earlier this year, another report said faster sea level rises in the second half of this century could make tidal flooding a daily occurrence for some installations.
Francesco Femia, co-founder and president of the Center for Climate and Security, said the reports show bipartisan national security and military officials think the existing U.S. response to climate change "is not commensurate to the threat".
The fact that a large and bipartisan number of former officials signed the reports could increase pressure on future U.S. administrations to place greater emphasis and dedicate more resources to combat climate change.
Addressing climate change has not been a top priority in a 2016 campaign dominated by the U.S. economy, trade and foreign policy.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said that global warming is a concept "created by the and for the Chinese" to hurt U.S. business.
Democrat Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has advocated shifting the country to 50 percent clean energy by 2030 and promised heavy regulation of fracking.

Links

• Bipartisan Groups of Military and Security Leaders Urge New Course on Climate
• Climate Security Consensus Project Statement
• Climate and Security Advisory Group: Briefing Book for a New Administration
• Military Expert Panel Report: Sea Level Rise and the U.S. Military’s Mission