Your most valued bubble: Health and Climate Change

You never know what you have until it’s gone, especially when we are talking about health. As seen before, climate change could damage our lives in many ways, but the most personal and tragic one is definitely the bubble of our wellbeing.

 

There are many ways in which this can happen. Climate change takes different routes to damage persons. It could take a rapid way and kill somebody in a couple of hours, or it can build up certain conditions in our body for several years until we can’t stand it anymore and eventually die.

In order to have a better idea of the roadmap in which climate change gets to our bodies, we can disaggregate that process in three risk stages according to McMichael (2013):

Primary risk: this are the direct consequences of changing the atmospheric conditions that could result in more intense or frequent heat waves, tropical storms, temperature-enhanced levels of air pollutants and so on. Therefore persons would be at risk just by the atmospheric conditions that surround them and their implications to their physiology.

For example, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office sponsored a study in 2016 that showed how atmospheric conditions that correspond with the worst case scenario would be physiologically intolerable for outdoors workers during the hottest month in northern India, making impossible the agricultural activities. Which take us to the next risk stage. 

This a 'Graphical Abstract' of one study (Xinrui et al., 2016) that shows the relation between mortality in Hefei (a city in China) and temperature-enhanced levels of air pollution. It concludes that illiterate people and female are the most affected.

Secondary Risk: this stage of health’s risk is driven by all the changes in the ecological systems that surround us. We have shaped our lives, cities, food yields, habits and even medicines having in mind certain environmental conditions and assuming they will remain stable, but whenever they change so rapidly everything start to fail and eventually the failures reach our health.

The two major risk arise from food yields and water supplies failure. But also the change in disease patterns play a very important role. For example, in China is projected that schistosomiasis (a disease caused by parasitic worms)  will affect another 20 million people by 2050 under a medium climate change scenario that causes an extension of the transmission zone in the country. 

Predicted risk map of schistosomiasis transmission in China in 2050 (green color denotes potential risk areas for schistosomiasis transmission in 2000, and blue color denotes predicted additional risk areas).  Source: Zhou et al., 2008  - quite old but really illustrative -.

Tertiary Risk: This can be seen as more diffuse effects caused by the situations presented above. A failing farming community or a displaced group could easily suffer mental health problems and tension that lead to health risk. 

A crop fails in India and this women have to find ways to overcome their situation. Source: The indian Express, Photo: Photo by: Kavitha Iyer

Reducing the risk

Mitigation of climate change already implies and immediate local health benefit. Here are some examples:

• Clean modes of transportation would reduce the local air pollution and the global greenhouse gases (GHG).
• Improving public transport and making pedestrian and cycling-friendly roads would tackle the sedentary living habits as well as reducing GHGs.
• Low-carbon fuels would reduce GHG as well as providing a cleaner alternative for the indoor-polluting cooking fuels in poor communities
• Improvements in reproductive literacy would lead to fewer and better-spaced pregnancies which would be healthier and reduce pressure in ecological and climate systems.
• Innovative urban design would increase the energy efficiency and reduce the effects of heat islands as well as promote community cohesion.

We may talk more in detail about health and climate change in the future. But for now we have superficially covered the whole spectrum that this complex topic entails. Meanwhile take care of yourself in this cold season, and go for a hot chocolate or a mulled wine! Read you later.