Extreme climate change heat 'medical emergency' is making tens of millions sick

Thursday, 29 November 2018

The proportion of the world's people vulnerable to heat-related death and disease continues to grow because of human-caused climate change, a new report says.

'Climate change is a medical emergency,' said Renee Salas, a doctor of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the report published by British medical journal the Lancet.

In 2017, about 157 million more people were exposed to heat wave events globally than in 2000, the report said. Also last year, an estimated 153 billion hours of labour were lost worldwide because of heat, an increase of more than 62 billion hours since 2000.

'We're seeing increases in the frequency, intensity and duration of heat waves,' report co-author Kristie Ebi, of the University of Washington, said. 'As our populations age and as they move into cities that have got urban heat islands, we're seeing a large increase in the number of people who are vulnerable to high temperatures.'

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Bruce Lemke, a former physicist and physiology lecturer at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology, was a contributor to the report, focusing on the impacts of climate change on working people.

Looked at narrowly, New Zealand was in quite a good position in terms of the impact of climate change on the ability of people to work, he said.

'New Zealand is not currently vulnerable. For some industries, like forestry, that could be a risk as it gets a bit hotter.' But being a wealthy country New Zealand could take a range of measures, for example using air conditioned tractors, to ameliorate the impacts on workers of climate change.

'It's not just what's going to affect me and you, it's what going to affect the globe and future generations,' Lemke said.

The most vulnerable countries were the hotter and poorer countries, such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Higher temperatures leading to more deaths raised many issues for those places.

As it became hotter and lost working hours increased, people in the most affected countries would migrate to wealthier, less hot places such as New Zealand, Europe and the United States, he said.

Lemke is also involved in a paper coming out in the Lancet in a few months looking at the issue of survivability as temperatures rise. 'There are a number of places where it's going to be difficult to survive by 2085 - most of those are in the tropics,' he said.

It was already difficult to survive outdoors in some countries, such as those around the Persian Gulf, but those places were fairly wealthy and people were able to spend much of their time in air conditioned buildings.

The Lancet report raised concerns that the potential geographic range of mosquitoes that can carry diseases such as dengue fever and Zika increased dramatically with higher temperatures.

It also said about 712 climate-related extreme events were responsible for $US326 billion ($NZ475b) of losses in 2017, almost triple the losses of 2016.

Floods and extreme temperature events had become more extreme since 1990, but there was no clear upward or downward trend in the lethality of those events, the report said.

'Governments and national health services are increasingly adapting to extreme weather events and climate change with impressive results.'

In an editorial that accompanied the report, the Lancet warned that in the next few decades, 'heatstroke and extreme weather will have redefined global labour and production beyond recognition. Multiple cities will be uninhabitable and migration patterns will be far beyond those levels already creating pressure worldwide.'

The report was written by experts from 27 leading academic institutions, the United Nations and intergovernmental agencies from every continent.

- Stuff, USA Today