Lethal Heating: 08/23/17

23/08/2017

A Changing Climate

AJP - Sheshtyn Paola

How will health services survive climate change impacts on rural and remote populations?

Climate change threatens to impact the lives of Australians living in rural and remote regions, through increased intensity of rainfall and tropical cyclones, high-fire danger days, drought and heat wave.
Scientists also predict agricultural viability will be compromised by drier soils and the unpredictability of extreme weather events, and exposure to air pollutants will increasingly impact population health, according to research published in the Australian Journal of Rural Health.
It is predicted that climate change effects will lead to increases in:

Physical injury;
Heat-related illness;
Nutritional disorders;
Infectious diseases;
Mental health issues;
Cardiorespiratory illnesses;
Skin cancer;
Food security;
Water security; and
Vector-borne diseases.

Medical practitioner researchers from the University of Notre Dame in Wagga Wagga, NSW, interviewed health service managers working in rural and remote areas, in order to determine their opinions of climate change impacts and strategies to strengthen the health service response.

There will be a need for pharmacists and other healthcare practitioners to adapt to climate change pressures.

The majority of respondents (90%) agreed that climate change would impact the health of rural populations in the future with regard to heat-related illnesses, mental health, skin cancer and water security.
And most participants identified the following population groups as being most vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change:

Farmers;
Homeless persons;
The elderly;
Children; and
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.

However many (72%) reported there is scepticism regarding climate change among both health professionals and community members – hampering their ability to strengthen health services in order to prepare for future climate challenges.
It was also discussed that there is a greater need for public health education about the impacts of climate change among staff and the community in local health districts.
“The role of health services in providing education about the health impacts of climage change is well recognised,” say authors Dr Rachel Purcell and Dr Joe McGirr.
“The need for health professionals to be aware of the health impacts of climate change has begun to be recognised in the policies and professional development activities of postgraduate training colleges and public health bodies.
“[Health service managers’] recommendations for strengthening the capacity of rural health services are integral to shaping the response of the rural health sector to climate change.”
There are several organisations including health practitioners with the collective goal of preparing for climate change and advocating for pro-environmental policies.

Most participants identified children and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People as being some of the most vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change.

Pharmacists for the Environment Australia (PEA), for example, is involved in climate change advocacy and late last year became a member of Climate and Health Alliance.
The Climate and Health Alliance is a coalition of healthcare stakeholders who wish to see the threat to human health from climate change and ecological degradation addressed through prompt policy action.

As a member of the Climate and Health Alliance, Pharmacists for the Environment Australia says that it recognises “health care stakeholders have a particular responsibility to the community in advocating for public policy that will promote and protect human health.”

Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) is another active organisation that says one of their primary concerns is the health effects of climate change on humans and the biosphere on which humans depend.
“Global warming and climate change have serious implications for human health globally,” says the DEA in its May 2017 submission to the Federal Government’s discussion paper, Review of Australia’s Climate Change Policy.
“It is increasingly recognised that climate change is only one facet of a planetary health crisis; deforestation, air pollution, ocean acidification and biodiversity loss all pose grave threats to health,” they argue.
“Climate change threatens to further exacerbate problems in these domains. If the current trend continues, there is a real danger that efforts will be insufficient to prevent run-away global warming, which will have disastrous social, economic and health consequences.
“The mining and combustion of fossil-fuels, in particular coal, also have direct adverse effects from emission of toxic substances and pollution with particulates.
“The burden of repair of the environment is being passed to the next generations.”

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Climate Change Sets The World On Fire

Deutsche Welle

Southern Europe and British Columbia have been devastated by wildfires this summer. And they're not the only ones - it seems like much of the world is ablaze right now, and this could be the new normal.

There have been many wildfires aound the world this summer. Canada has seen the worst season for fires since records began, with 894,941 hectares burned, the British Columbia Wildfire Service has confirmed. Large areas of the Western United States have also been affected.
Meanwhile in Portugal, 2,000 people were recently cut off by flames and smoke encircling the town of Macao. And earlier this summer, 64 people were killed by a blaze in the country.
Like Canada, southern Europe has seen a record heatwave this year, creating hot, dry conditions that saw Italy, France, Croatia, Spain and Greece all swept by wildfires. As a result, Europe has reportedly seen three times the average number of wildfires this summer.
But it's not just Canada and southern Europe that have been affected. In Siberia, wildfire destroyed hundreds of homes, and around 700 hectares of Armenian forest have also been destroyed by fire. Earlier this year, Chile saw wildfires that were unparalleled in the country's history, according to the President.
Even Greenland, not known for its hot dry conditions, suffered an unprecedented blaze this summer.

Central Portugal has been one of the areas hardest hit by fires this summer

The big picture
"A lot of these things are happening locally, but people don't always connect them to climate change," said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the US. "But there is a real climate change component to this and the risk is going up because of climate change."
With global temperatures rising, scientists say wildfires are likely to become increasingly frequent and widespread. "What's really happening is that there is extra heat available," Trenberth told DW. "That heat has to go somewhere and some of it goes into raising temperatures. But the first thing that happens is that it goes into drying - it dries out plants and increases the risk of wildfires."
The map above, compiling NASA satellite data on fires from the beginning of 2017 until mid-August makes it looks as if the whole world is on fire.
So is 2017 a record year of wildfires?

Wildfire rages in British Colombia, on July 8. It has now been confirmed the state's biggest in more than 50 years

Tough competition
It certainly looks like it's been a big year for fires in southern Europe and North America. But Martin Wooster, professor of earth observation science at King's College London, says other parts of the world have seen worse in recent years.
"For example, this year, fires across Southeast Asia are extremely unlikely to be anything like as severe as they were in 2015," he told DW.
Two years ago, drought caused by El Nino created lethal conditions for Indonesian forests and peatlands that were already degraded by draining and logging. The smoldering peat - ancient, decayed vegetable matter condensed into a carbon-heavy fuel - kept fires burning for months on end.
"This led to huge fires, far bigger than any seen in Europe, and some of the worst air pollution ever experienced," Wooster said.

NASA imagery shows a large wildfire burning in Sweden in early August

Longer fire seasons - longer recovery
But there does appear to be a distinct trend for fire seasons to be longer and more harsh. "In the western United States, the general perception is that there is no wildfire season any more, but that it's continuous all year round," Trenberth told DW.
In many parts of the world, wildfires are part of a natural cycle. Savannahs, for example, are maintained by fire. Some trees not only survive fires, but need them to release their seeds. Human intervention can disrupt these cycles, the scientific discipline of fire ecology has found. Putting out small fires can allow flammable debris to accumulate until a colossal fire starts that cannot be controlled.
But global warming is resulting in hotter, drier conditions that mean such infernos are becoming more common, even with careful forest management. And the changed climatic conditions can mean forests take far longer to recover. Meanwhile, fires are also starting in habitats in areas like the tropics that have no natural fire ecology.

A wildfire smolders near Nice in the south of France in July

Human fingerprints
Climate change isn't the only manmade factor. Fires can also be started by careless humans dropping cigarettes or letting campfires get out of control.
And in regions like the Amazon, where the annual fire season increased by 19 percent between 1979 and 2013, fire is deliberately used to clear forest to make way for agriculture. "Farmers light fires to clear an area and what happens in drought conditions is that these fires become wild because the vegetation is so dry, it gets out of control," Trenberth said.
And all this can have a feedback effect - more fires mean more carbon released into the atmosphere, which in turn drives climate change.

Wildfires rage through Southeast Europe: Too close for comfort

Smoke and flames rise from a fire in the Croatian village of Podstrana, near the Adriatic coastal town of Split, on July 18, 2017. In Croatia, the blazes have spread over several locations along the coast and onto the islands, engulfing pine forests and low shrubbery in extremely dry and windy weather.

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Dry Winter Primes Sydney Basin For Early Start Of Bushfire Season

The Conversation - Matthias Boer | Rachael Helene Nolan | Ross Bradstoc k

Smoke from hazard reduction burning has blanketed parts of Sydney, as firefighters prepare for a ‘horrific’ bushfire season. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

It might feel like the depths of winter, but Australian fire services are preparing for an early start to the bushfire season. Sydney has been covered with smoke from hazard reduction burns, and the New South Wales Rural Fire Service has forecast a “horrific” season.
Predicting the severity of a bushfire season isn’t easy, and – much like the near-annual announcements of the “worst flu season on record” – repeated warnings can diminish their urgency.
However, new modelling that combines Bureau of Meteorology data with NASA satellite imaging has found that record-setting July warmth and low rainfall have created conditions very similar to 2013, when highly destructive bushfires burned across NSW and Victoria.
Crucially, this research has found we’re approaching a crucial dryness threshold, past which fires are historically far more dangerous.

How to measure bushfire fuel
On September 10, 2013 several bushfires in Sydney’s West caused havoc well before the official start of the bushfire season. These were a precursor to fires that destroyed more than 200 properties a month later. Warm, dry winter weather had dried out the fuels in Sydney’s forests and bush reserves beyond “normal” levels for the time of year.
The timing and severity of those preseason fires were a reminder that the region’s forests are flammable all year round; they can burn whenever the fuel they contain dries out past a certain threshold.
In most forests, there is an abundance of fuel in the form of leaf litter, dead twigs, branches and logs, lower vegetation such as shrubs and grasses, as well as higher foliage and branches.
The flammability of all these different kinds of fuel depends largely on their moisture content. Leaf litter and fine dead branches on the soil surface can dry out in a matter of days, whereas logs may take weeks or months to lose their moisture. The moisture content of shrubs and tree canopies varies depending on the amount of water in the soil, so they reflect the overall rainfall and temperatures across a whole season.
The flammability of an entire forest is therefore a complex calculation of all these different kinds of fuel (both alive and dead) and their different moisture levels.

Mapping Sydney’s forests
In a recent collaborative study, we combined data from a Bureau of Meteorology project that maps water availability levels across Australia with satellite imagery to develop new tools for mapping and monitoring moisture levels of different fuels in forests and woodlands.
We checked these tools by modelling fuel moisture levels during fires in NSW, Victoria and the ACT between 2000 and 2014, and comparing our predictions to historical bushfires.
Our research has identified critical dryness thresholds associated with significant increases in fire area. Rather than a gradual increase in flammability as forests dry out, when dead fuel moisture drops below 15% subsequent bushfires are larger. Another jump occurs when dead fuel moisture levels fall below 10%. We found similar thresholds in growing plants, although their moisture content is measured differently.
These dryness thresholds are pivotal, because they may represent the breakdown of moist natural barriers in landscapes that prevent fires from spreading. Understanding these mechanisms makes it possible to predict fire risk much more accurately.
As part of this project we compared the fuel moisture in Sydney Basin’s forested areas in 2013 and 2017. As shown in the chart below, currently the live fuel moisture level is tracking well below the 2013 values, and is approaching a crucial threshold (indicated by the dotted line).
The moisture content of dead fuel has been more variable, but it has also dipped below the 2013 curve and, if warm dry weather continues, could reach critical levels before the end of August.

The median predicted dead fuel moisture content and live fuel moisture content in forest areas of the Sydney Basin Bioregion in 2013 and 2017. Black dashed horizontal lines indicate fuel moisture threshold values. The start dates of major fires in 2013 are indicated by orange vertical lines. Author provided, Author provided

In another worrying sign, mapping shows critically dry live fuel is much more abundant in 2017 than it was in 2013.

Remotely sensed live fuel moisture content in forest areas of the Sydney Basin Bioregion in July 2013 (left) and July 2017 (right). Author provided

It’s clear that much of the Sydney Basin is dangerously primed for major bushfires, at least until it receives major rainfall. Forecasts for windy but largely dry weather in coming weeks may exacerbate this problem.

These new insights into landscape-scale fuel dryness provide a powerful indicator of what might be expected. They also build our capacity for week by week monitoring of fire potential.
Preparation by both fire management authorities and exposed homeowners is now an immediate priority, to cope with the strong likelihood of an early and severe fire season.

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