Climate change should be recorded as a cause of death on death certificates in Australia because heat-related mortality is so vastly unreported, according to commentary published in The Lancet Planetary Health on Thursday.
Over the past 11 years in Australia, just 340 deaths have been recorded as being caused by excessive heat, but statistical analysis by two doctors with the Australian National University shows that 36,765 could have been attributed to heat.
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| Scarlett Rigato, 5, holds a sign during a climate change protest by parents and students in Sydney last year. Credit: Kate Geraghty |
She said it was acknowledged that phenomena caused or exacerbated by climate change - such as drought, bushfires, floods and storms - had an impact on illness and death rates in Australia, but that there was no way to acknowledge these factors on death certificates.
"If a farmer dies at the end of a five-year drought we know that the drought probably contributed to his death, but there is no way to record that.
"Does it matter? Yes. It is going to get hotter, we are going to see increasing amounts of morbidity and mortality as a result. If we recognise and record that, we might be able to mitigate it," she said.
"Climate change is the single greatest health threat that we face globally even after we recover from coronavirus.
"We are successfully tracking deaths from coronavirus, but we also need healthcare workers and systems to acknowledge the relationship between our health and our environment."
Dr Hunter and her co-author Dr Simon Quilty, call for death certificates to include more information about factors contributing to deaths.
"Death certification needs to be modernised, indirect causes should be reported, with all death certification prompting for external factors contributing to death, and these death data must be coupled with large-scale environmental datasets so that impact assessments can be done," they wrote.
Last year was Australia’s hottest year, with the temperature reaching 1.52 degrees above the long-term average, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.
During the bushfire crisis in January a temperature of 48.9 degrees was recorded in Penrith, eclipsing the previous heat record of 47.3 degrees recorded the previous January.
Links
- Heat-related mortality: an urgent need to recognise and record
- Calls to add ‘climate change’ to death certificates
- Our environment has always affected our mortality, should we add climate change to death certificates?
- Heat responsible for thousands of Australian deaths every year: study
- Climate Change and Mortality (pdf)
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