Mala Rao OBEProfessor of International Health

University of East LondonSHOES, March 2014

The Health Impacts of Climate Change

Climate Change 2014:Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

• IPCC meeting in Japan this week to finalise the report

• Likely to focus on human impacts• Will warn that people in Asia could

face some of the worst effects of global warming

• Flooding, famine and rising sea levels will put hundreds of millions at risk in one of the world's most vulnerable regions

Robin McKie, science editor The Observer, Saturday 22 March 2014 21.21 GMT

South Asia – The context

• home to over 1.7 billion people• almost a quarter of the world’s

population. • by 2050, may have grown another

40%, to about 2.4 billion• vulnerable coastal megacities• endemic and widespread poverty• poor adaptive capacity • the effects of climate change here

will have global repercussions.International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, 2012

The challenges of gathering evidence

• research has focused on the medium-term

• limited availability of high quality quantitative data and uncertainty of modeling

• focus mainly includes heat waves, extreme weather events, flooding, vector borne and diarhoeal disease, water scarcity, drought

Tertiary level impacts

• the tertiary effects at the intersection of complex systems and large-scale societal changes

• do not fit easily into mathematical models

• they result from interplay between people, politics and ecology

• 2014 IPCC focus on tertiary impacts is welcome

Food security

India is home to 1/6th of the world’s population, while only endowed with 1/25th of the world’s available water resources.

Source: Fresh water under threat,SouthAsia: Vulnerability of freshwater resources to environmental change, United Nations Environment Programme

Food security

• crop yields projected to decrease by 5-30% in Asia by 2050

• farmer suicides in India at an all time high• 132 million additional people likely to risk

chronic hunger• under-nutrition in S Asia causes almost a

million deaths of children under a year old• numbers going hungry may increase by 1%

for every 2-2.5% rise in food prices

IPCC, 2007

Climate Conflicts

• Darfur, Sudan

• Conflicts between communities

Source: . A Climate of Conflict, The links between climate change, peace and war. London: International Alert Smith and Vivekananda, 2007

Migration

• Many islands under serious risk of inundation

• Coastal flooding, increasing salinity of coastal freshwaters and declining fish populations

• Maldives preparing for internal migration

Source: Human health. Climate change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working

Group II to the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge Univ Press. Republic of Maldives, 2007

The impacts of migration on health

• trauma, undernutrition, water and food scarcity, transmission of infectious disease, mental distress, poor reproductive health and child health

Zimmerman et al., 2011

Economic instability• increasing globalization - complex, tortuous

and vulnerable international supply chains • an example - flight bans caused by the

eruption of an Icelandic volcano in 2010 • sea level rises, extreme weather events may disrupt ports and airports, affecting freight transport, including medicines• floods in Uttarakhand, India, 2013 damaged

roads, transport of health supplies, undermined access to health facilities, worsening the humanitarian impact of the disaster Committee on Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Social and Political Stresses, 2012, Rao and Beckingham, 2013, Foresight

International Dimensions of Climate Change, 2011