Health: The Human Face of Climate Change

By Esther Butamanya

“Every century has its own public health challenges; climate change is our century’s challenge.” – Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organisation (2006 to 2017).

While climate change is recognised as a global issue, it continues to pose significant threats specifically to global public health, increasing the vulnerability of already vulnerable regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, which are the least contributors to greenhouse gas emissions causing and exacerbating this challenge. Several effects of climate change, such as rising temperatures, extreme weather events, air pollution, and changing disease patterns, all impact human health both directly and indirectly, making already existing health disparities in these regions worse. These effects are no longer distant; we are feeling them now in the form of deadly floods in East Africa, hurricanes destroying coastal cities in the United States of America, and megafires sweeping across the Amazon. Each of these effects has the potential to destroy health and health systems in affected areas, emphasising the need to prioritise health and well-being in our climate action efforts.

The pace of environmental degradation brought on by climate change continues to increase, creating direct and indirect impacts on health, driving several types of disease burdens, including communicable and non-communicable diseases (NCDs), vector-borne diseases, maternal and child health, and mental health.

Direct effects

• Non-communicable diseases

These include the triggering and/or exacerbation of NCDs, primarily cardiovascular disease and chronic respiratory diseases, which cause about 40 million deaths globally annually. Increases in air pollution caused by climate change also increase the risk of NCDs, significantly burdening health systems. The 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change reported 50 extra days of “health-threatening heat” in 2023, brought on by climate change. As a result, 512 billion potential work hours in the service, construction, agriculture, and service industries were lost as a result of heat exposure, resulting in an estimated loss of US$ 835 billion in incomes.

• Communicable and vector-borne diseases

Climate change also facilitates the transmission of deadly communicable and vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, and respiratory infections such as pneumonia. The transmission of malaria, which is intricately tied to rainfall patterns, has been seen to spike in extreme weather events such as flooding.

• Mental health

Rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and increased air pollution exposure have been seen to amplify negative (and worsen pre-existing) mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, increasing the risk of suicide and hospital admission rates.

Mental health conditions caused as a result of climate change are estimated to cost almost US$ 47 billion annually by the year 2030.

Indirect effects

The indirect impacts of climate change on health occur as a result of its effect on the social and economic structures of the societies in which people live. Some of these include gender, security, poverty, access to food and safe water, employment, and education. Climate change damages these structures, destroying infrastructure and access to food and safe water, creating conflict, and fueling economic losses through unemployment.

• 132 million people are currently under threat of being pushed into extreme poverty, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, reversing significantly hard-won economic development gains and worsening already dangerously low access to health institutions.
• With climate change raising the frequency and severity of droughts and water shortages and contamination, 920 million children are already at a significantly high risk of experiencing water scarcity, which is only expected to get worse.
• Climate change-caused environmental disasters influence conflict and therefore migration, owing to exacerbated economic, social, and environmental factors; the Institute for Economics and Peace Ecological Threat Register of 2020 estimated climate change might displace 1.2 billion people globally by 2050.

In simple terms, health cannot continue to be siloed or considered a secondary issue in climate change discussions; climate inaction has serious health consequences affecting all sectors.

Effecting systemic change is therefore urgently required to ensure a holistic and people-centred approach to addressing the interconnectedness of the impact of climate change. Our climate change response necessitates rapid advancements in mitigation, adaptation, resilience, and Loss and Damage (L&D), recognising and exploiting the opportunities and co-benefits of climate justice and action not just to the economy and society, but to health as well.

Call to action

Health is the face and lived experience of climate change. Our health is not negotiable.

Through working collectively, governments, policy-makers, global economic leaders, the private sector, and the people can ensure that the right steps are taken to ensure a robust response to health-related climate change impacts:

• Integrating health into national climate action: Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs)
• Training and capacity building for a climate-resilient health workforce
• Innovative health financing through equitable and accessible financing facilities like grants and global health insurance in high climate risk regions, which aid rapid response and foster long-term health resilience.
• Strengthen global health surveillance and rapid response systems in particularly low-income and high climate risk countries in order to improve climate change health-related mitigation and response, rapidly deploying much-needed health resources in the event of climate disasters and preventing health crises.

Conclusion

The continued increase in emissions through unregulated use of fossil fuels is making us sick and needs to stop NOW! Channeling our efforts towards climate action for health has become a matter of life or death. Focusing climate change efforts only or mainly on socio-economic factors takes away from the urgency of climate-related health impacts despite reaching critical tipping points and poses a significant threat not just to the quality of our lives but to human life itself. Member countries need to work urgently towards meeting the Paris Agreement goals, which are key to safeguarding global health. When we align health and climate policy, we put health at the centre of climate action, unlocking significant co-benefits across all domains such as economic stability and social equity, and drive action at a pace and scale crucial to address this critical challenge, arguably the biggest one of our generation.