National academies say effects include spread of diseases and worse mental health
The report anticipates the spread of infectious diseases in Europe as
temperatures rise and increase the range of mosquitoes that transmit
dengue fever.
Photograph: Ricardo Mazalan/AP
A report
by experts from 27 national science academies has set out the
widespread damage global heating is already causing to people’s health
and the increasingly serious impacts expected in future.
Scorching heatwaves and floods will claim more victims as extreme
weather increases but there are serious indirect effects too, from
spreading mosquito-borne diseases to worsening mental health.
“There are impacts occurring now [and], over the coming century,
climate change has to be ranked as one of the most serious threats to
health,” said Prof Sir Andrew Haines, a co-chair of the report for the
European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (Easac).
However, there were also great benefits from action to cut carbon
emissions, the report found, most notably cutting the 350,000 early
deaths from air pollution every year in Europe caused by burning fossil
fuels. “The economic benefits of action to address the current and
prospective health effects of climate change are likely to be
substantial,” the report concluded.
The World Health Organization director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned in November that climate breakdown was already a health crisis.
“We cannot delay action on climate change,” he said. “We cannot
sleepwalk through this health emergency any longer.” In December, a WHO
report said tackling the climate crisis would save at least a million lives a year, making it a moral imperative to act.
A Serbian farmer Radovan Krstic shows his damaged corn crop. Photograph: Darko Vojinovic/AP
The new Easeac report, The Imperativeof Climate Action to Protect Human Health in Europe, assessed the scientific evidence of the effects of global heating on health. Extreme weather
such as heatwaves, floods and droughts have direct short-term impacts
but also affect people in the longer term. “Mental health effects
include post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, substance abuse and
depression,” the report said.
The scientists were also concerned by the effect of extreme
weather on food production, with studies showing a 5-25% cut in staple
crop yields across the Mediterranean region in coming decades. But the
report said even small cuts in meat eating could lead to significant cuts in carbon emissions, as well as benefits to health.
The report anticipates the spread of infectious diseases in Europe as
temperatures rise and increase the range of mosquitoes that transmit
dengue fever and ticks that cause Lyme disease. Food poisoning could
also rise, as salmonella bacteria thrived in warmer conditions, the
report said. It even found research suggesting antibiotic resistance in E coli increases in hotter conditions.
“We are exposing the whole of the world population to changes in
climate, and this is clearly very concerning as we are moving to some
extent into uncharted territory,” said Haines, professor of
environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine.
“We are subjecting young people and future generations to these
increasing [health] risks for many hundreds of years to come, if not
millennia,” he said. “We have to try to minimise the effects and move
towards a low-carbon economy.
“We think reframing climate change as a health issue can help to
engage the public because most people are not just concerned about their
own health, but about the health of their nearest and dearest and their
descendants.
“We think this is a way of mobilising the public and raising concern
in a constructive way and increasing the momentum for change.”
Global carbon emissions are still rising but scientists say rapid and deep cuts are needed to limit temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and avoid the worst impacts.
Officials sought to excise the State Department’s comments on climate science because they did not mesh with the administration’s stance
According to the National Park Service, Glacier
National Park’s ice sheets are a fraction of the size they were 100
years ago. (Beth J. Harpaz/AP)
White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week
to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate
change is “possibly catastrophic.”
The move came after State officials
refused to excise the document’s references to federal scientific
findings on climate change.
The effort to edit,
and ultimately suppress, the prepared testimony by the State
Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research comes as the Trump
administration is debating how best to challenge the fact that burning
fossil fuels is warming the planet and could pose serious risks unless
the world makes deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next
decade. Senior military and intelligence officials have continued to
warn climate change could undermine America’s national security — a
position President Trump rejects.
Officials from
the White House’s Office of Legislative Affairs, Office of Management
and Budget, and National Security Council all raised objections to parts
of the testimony that Rod Schoonover, who works in the Office of the
Geographer and Global Issues, prepared to present on the bureau’s behalf
for a hearing Wednesday.
The document lays out
in stark detail the implications of what the administration faces in
light of rising carbon emissions that the world has not curbed.
“Absent
extensive mitigating factors or events, we see few plausible future
scenarios where significant — possibly catastrophic — harm does not
arise from the compounded effects of climate change,” the document said.
White
House officials took aim at the document’s scientific citations, which
refer to work conducted by federal agencies including NASA and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
According
to several senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on the
condition of anonymity to talk about internal deliberations, Trump
officials sought to cut several pages of the document on the grounds
that its description of climate science did not mesh with the
administration’s official stance. Critics of the testimony included William Happer,
a National Security Council senior director who has touted the benefits
of carbon dioxide and sought to establish a federal task force to
challenge the scientific consensus that human activity is driving the
planet’s rising temperatures.
The Trump administration
released on Nov. 23 a long-awaited report outlining that climate change
impacts "are intensifying across the country."(Luis Velarde/The Washington Post)
Schoonover’s draft testimony was
peppered with comments from the National Security Council, criticizing
his characterization of the threats posed by climate change.
"This
is not objective testimony at all,” read one comment, according to an
individual familiar with the document. “It includes lots of climate
alarm propaganda that is not science at all. I am embarrassed to have
this go out on behalf of the executive branch of the Federal
Government.”
In another passage, Happer
objected to the phrase “tipping point” when describing how a certain
level of warming could trigger devastating climate-related impacts, the
individual said.
"‘Tipping points’ is a
propaganda slogan for the scientifically illiterate,” Happer wrote.
“They were a favorite of Al Gore’s science adviser, James Hansen.”
Administration
officials said the Office of Legislative Affairs ultimately decided
that Schoonover could appear before the House panel but could not submit
his office’s statement for the record because it did not, in the words
of one official, “jibe” with what the administration is seeking to do on
climate change. The official added that legislative affairs and
staffers at the Office of Management and Budget routinely review agency
officials’ prepared congressional testimony before they submit it.
A
House Intelligence Committee aide confirmed that the panel received the
written testimony of the two other intelligence officials who testified
at Wednesday’s public hearing, but not Schoonover’s.
Francesco
Femia, chief executive of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder
of the Center for Climate and Security, questioned why the White House
would not have allowed an intelligence official to offer a written
statement that would be entered into the permanent record.
“This
is an intentional failure of the White House to perform a core duty:
inform the American public of the threats we face. It’s dangerous and
unacceptable,” Femia said in an email Friday. “Any attempt to suppress
information on the security risks of climate change threatens to leave
the American public vulnerable and unsafe.”
Schoonover,
who serves as a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at California
Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, could not be reached
for comment Friday, and the State Department referred questions to the
White House. A White House spokesman, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said in an email, “The
administration does not comment on its internal policy review.”
The Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s 12-page prepared testimony, obtained by The Washington Post on Friday,
includes a detailed description of how rising greenhouse gas emissions
are raising global temperatures and acidifying the world’s oceans. It
warns that these changes are contributing to the frequency and intensity
of extreme weather events.
“Climate-linked
events are disruptive to humans and societies when they harm people
directly or substantially weaken the social, political, economic,
environmental, or infrastructure systems that support people,” the
statement reads. Noting that while some populations may benefit from
climate change, it said “the balance of documented evidence to date
suggests that net negative effects will overwhelm the positive benefits
from climate change for most of the world.”
The
document sounds the alarms on several fronts, outlining two dozen ways
that “climate-linked stresses” could affect human society. It identifies
nine tipping points that could transform the Earth’s system, including
“rapid melting in West Antarctic or Greenland ice masses” along with
“rapid die-offs of many critically important species, such as coral or
insects” and a “massive release of carbon” from methane that is now
frozen in the earth. It warns that because scientists have not been able
to calculate the likelihood of these thresholds being reached,
“crossing them is possible over any future timeframe.”
The
prepared testimony also notes that 18 of the past 20 years have ranked
as the warmest on record, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, “and the last five years have been the warmest five.”
The White House proposed eliminating all of these scientific references.
Trump has been steadfast in shrugging off warnings from scientists about the potential impacts of climate change, reiterating in an interview
with Piers Morgan on “Good Morning Britain” this week that he does not
regret pulling the United States out of a 2015 global climate accord
aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
“I
believe that there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both
ways,” he said. “Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming. That
wasn’t working. Then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually
called extreme weather because, with extreme weather, you can’t miss.”
During
the interview he blamed China, India and Russia for polluting the
environment and insisted the United States has “among the cleanest
climates,” noting that the United States had suffered extreme weather in
the past. “Forty years ago, we had the worst tornado binge we’ve ever
had. In the 1890s, we had our worst hurricanes.”
The United States remains the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind China.
What the president meant by “worst hurricanes” is unclear. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the six most costly
hurricanes on record have all occurred since 2005, and three — Maria,
Harvey and Irma — have hit the United States during Trump’s tenure. The
Galveston Hurricane of 1900, in which at least 6,000 people perished,
remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
As
for tornadoes, they have tended to follow boom-and-bust cycles over the
decades. The nation saw a relatively low number of tornadoes last year,
although this year already
nearly 1,000 have been reported. In general, scientists have warned
that climate change will make a variety of extreme weather events more
likely, namely droughts, hurricanes and wildfires.
Camilo
Mora, a geographer and environmental professor at the University of
Hawaii, said in an email that the president is rejecting the conclusions
made by scientists in his own government.
“The
evidence on this issue is overwhelming,” Mora said. “The president
questions our change in jargon from warming to climate change to
extremes as uncertainty on our side, but in reality we have come to
learn that the impacts of greenhouse gases are much broader than we
originally thought. By increasing atmospheric temperature, greenhouse
gases can also cause drought and heat waves, ripening conditions for
wildfires. In humid places, heat causes constant soil water evaporation
leading to extreme precipitation, which falls on saturated soils and
thus you commonly also get floods.”
Despite the
internal controversy over the testimony prepared for Wednesday’s
hearing, all three witnesses detailed ways in which climate-related
impacts could exacerbate existing national security risks. Peter Kiemel,
counselor at the National Intelligence Council, and Jeffrey Ringhausen,
a senior analyst at the Office of Naval Intelligence, talked about
issues ranging from how terrorist cells could capitalize on water
shortages to disputes with other nations over shifting fishing grounds.
Schoonover,
for his part, said in his opening statement that the planet was warming
and that it could pose a major risk to the United States and other
nations.
“The Earth’s climate is unequivocally
undergoing a long-term warming trend, as established by decades of
scientific measurements and multiple, independent lines of evidence,” he
said, adding later:
“Climate change effects could undermine important
international systems on which the U.S. is critically dependent, such as
trade routes, food and energy supplies, the global economy and domestic
stability abroad.”
Feeding a future global population of 10 billion people without causing a climate catastrophe this century will require transformational change across the entire value chain.
Fresh evidence suggests climate change is already impacting crop yields.
What are the key challenges and opportunities?
Climate change presents various threats to human and planetary health. Not least among these are the risks to food and nutrition security.
This issue was flagged by a recent far-reaching report from the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC).
According to the report, which surveyed a “large body” of independent studies on the health implications of climate change, global warming is already having an adverse impact on human health and risks are only projected to increase.
Current trends in greenhouse gas emissions point to a global average temperature rise of more than 3°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, well above the maximum 2°C target enshrined in the Paris Climate Change Agreement.
The temperature rise will be higher over land than oceans, exposing people to “unprecedented” rates of climate change and contributing to the burden of disease and premature death, EASAC noted.
Working group co-chair, Professor Sir Andy Haines of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said he hoped the report would act as a “wake-up call” to draw attention to the need for action to decarbonise the economy. “The protection of health must have a higher profile in policies aimed at mitigating or adapting to the effects of climate change,” he stressed. “If urgent action is not taken to reduce emissions in order to keep temperatures below the 2°C (or less) limit ... we face potentially irreversible changes that will have wide ranging impacts on many aspects of health.” Food supply under threat
Climate change is an undeniable risk to food security because it will impact the agricultural production systems on which we reply.
Higher temperatures have long been projected to have a negative impact on crop yields. But a new study led by the University of Minnesota in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the University of Copenhagen presents fresh evidence that this is already happening.
Researchers looked at yields of barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat, which account for 83% of the calories produced on arable land. They found that changes in climactic conditions are already impacting harvests.
Based on reported weather and crop data, they found climate change causes a significant yield variation, ranging from a decrease of 13.4% for palm oil to an increase of 3.5% for soybeans. An average reduction in yield of around 1% was detected.
Impacts varied by both crop type and geography. The implications of climate change on global food production are mostly negative in Europe, Southern Africa, and Australia, generally positive in Latin America, and mixed in Asia and Northern and Central America, the researchers noted.
Half of all food-insecure countries are experiencing decreases in crop production -- and so are some affluent industrialised countries in Western Europe. "There are winners and losers, and some countries that are already food insecure fare worse," said lead author Deepak Ray of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment. "The research documents how change is already happening, not just in some future time.”
The EASAC researchers stressed that the economic clout of the European region would likely mean lower domestic production sparked by climate change would probably be offset by higher food imports. “But this will have increasing consequences for the rest of the world; for example, by importing fodder for livestock from arable land that has been created through deforestation. “It is therefore vital to develop climate-smart food systems to ensure more resilient agricultural production and to promote food and nutrition security, for the benefit of human health.” What can be done? Better understanding of agriculture and the food system's unique place in climate change - as both drivers of climate change and victims of it - is helping to increase support for climate action.
Nevertheless, progress across the food system is “lagging”, according to new analysis from CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).
Ana María Loboguerrero, the head of global policy research at CCAFS, argues that climate change mitigation efforts need to stretch well beyond agricultural production systems to encompass the entire food chain.
"If you think about the two-degree increase, efforts need to go beyond the agricultural sector," said Loboguerrero. "This means reducing emissions by stopping deforestation, decreasing food loss and waste, reducing supply chain emissions, and rethinking human diets, if we really want to get on track to that target."
Agricultural production accounts for about 10-12% of all emissions.
Significantly, food waste alone accounts for almost as many GHG emissions as agriculture. With one-third of all food produced thrown away, food waste contributes 8% of global emissions. If just 25% of this waste was saved, it would feed an additional 870 million people, Loboguerrero stressed.
Various barriers, ranging from economic to social factors, mean that the uptake of emission-reducing practices in agriculture is slow.
Even under the most optimistic uptake scenarios, studies have shown that by 2030 these practices will only contribute 21-40% of a one-gigaton reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, which would be about 1% of current annual CO2 emissions, the researchers stressed.
For this reason alone, Loboguerrero suggested, tackling the relatively low hanging fruit of food waste offers an important quick win.
"Food loss and waste is a big opportunity," Loboguerrero said. "Addressing this issue can reduce emissions intensity, potentially improve global nutrition and boost the bottom line for smallholders, who are hardest hit by losses on the farm."
Deforestation in tropical regions – largely driven by the growing demand for agricultural commodities, such as palm oil, soy and cocoa – must be addressed, NGOs such as Global Canopy stress. “Our global demand for commodities such as palm oil, soy, beef and paper packaging is driving forest loss, exacerbating climate change and putting biodiversity at risk,” Sarah Rogerson, a researcher in Global Canopy’s supply chain programme, warned.
In its recent ‘Forest 500’ report, Global Canopy compiled a list of the best – and worst – performers taking action on deforestation in their supply chains.
The top five manufacturers included Nestlé, Unilever and Mars alongside personal care and consumer products companies Kao Corp and L’Oreal. From retail, Marks and Spencer, IKEA, News Corp McDonald’s and Pearson ranked best.
Major global corporations in the food sector have pledged to end deforestation in their supply chains by 2020 under the New York Declaration. But, while the issue of deforestation is commanding increasing attention, Global Canopy was critical that “strong commitments” are failing to be translated to action on the ground.
Robertson said food manufacturers need to raise their game: “The most powerful companies in forest-risk supply chains do not appear to be implementing the commitments they have set to meet global deforestation targets. With the 2020 deadline looming, it is critical that companies raise their ambition and address the stark gap between the promises they have made and activities on the ground."
One of the most significant actions that can be taken to decarbonise the food system, EASAC argues, is the promotion of “healthier, more sustainable diets”. This includes increased fruit, vegetable and legume consumption and reduced red meat intake.
This shift would “lower the burden of non-communicable diseases and reduce greenhouse gas emissions”, the European scientists argue. “Promoting dietary change could have major health and environmental benefits, resulting in significant reductions of up to about 40% in greenhouse gas emissions from food systems as well as reducing water and land use demands. Such diets can also lead to major reductions on non-communicable disease burden through reduced risk of heart disease, stroke and other conditions,” EASAC suggested.
CCAFS researchers agree that growing global demand for animal production is a key challenge to climate mitigation efforts.
By 2000, the sector contributed an estimated 18% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, when accounting for related deforestation and land-use change as well as direct emissions. Given current trends in population growth and meat consumption, the sector could account for about a quarter of all emissions by 2050, CCAFS warned. "Reducing meat and dairy emissions needs to be a priority," said Lini Wollenberg, flagship leader of CCAFS' low-emissions development research. "And the good news is that we have lots of options in the pipeline, ranging from low-emissions cattle to meat alternatives. We need more research and development to make some of these options a reality."
Loboguerrero stressed that mitigation efforts will require political will in an environment that is more open to adaption.
Adaptation - learning to cope with the problem - is a far easier sell than mitigation - reducing emissions - which is often seen as constraining farming options and increasing costs. Developing countries frequently complain that mitigation measures will limit economic growth. "There is a lot of tension and you can see it when you go into the negotiations. Some countries don't even want to begin discussions on the mitigation side of things," Loboguerrero said. "Adaptation is something that everyone, however, agrees is necessary. Everyone is keen on discussing adaptation. Some adaptation measures have the co-benefit for mitigation. It's like an entrance to discussing some things at some points that are a little bit taboo in the negotiations."
*Katy Askew joined FoodNavigator as editor in 2017. Katy’s areas of interest include market trends, sustainability issues and corporate development.
