Climate and Us | The domino effect that the climate crisis unleashes on health
Unlike a pandemic, which causes a sudden spike in deaths and infections, the global health impact of the climate crisis — both mental and physical — is unfolding gradually.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s working group II report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, released on Monday should be a wake-up call for the Centre and state governments in India.
Extreme heat has negative impacts on mental health, wellbeing, life satisfaction, happiness, cognitive performance, and aggression, IPCC has said. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Apart from the devastating and irreversible consequences of the climate crisis being recorded on several ecosystems globally including the Himalayas, the health and wellbeing chapter of the report is a worrying account of how several climate-driven mental health conditions, diseases and other related deaths are shooting up.
Without a strong public health system and strategies to cope with extreme heat in every state, several parts of India are now staring at catastrophe.
Climate variability including temperature, relative humidity, rainfall and population mobility has led to increases in dengue globally and the chikungunya virus in Asia, Latin America, North America, and Europe. Higher temperatures, heavy rainfall events, and flooding are associated with an increase in diarrheal diseases in several regions. These diarrheal diseases include cholera, other gastro-intestinal infections, and food-borne diseases due to Salmonella and Campylobacter.
Floods have led to increases in vector-borne and water-borne diseases and have caused disturbances of public health services. Climate extremes increase the risks of several types of respiratory tract infections that the IPCC has flagged, while wildfires, storms, and floods are followed by a spike in the rates of mental illness in exposed populations.
Spring pollen season in northern mid-latitudes is occurring earlier due to the climate crisis, increasing the risks of allergic respiratory diseases; potential hours of work lost due to heat has also increased significantly over the past two decades. Some regions are already experiencing heat stress conditions and approaching the upper limits of labour productivity.
Extreme heat has negative impacts on mental health, wellbeing, life satisfaction, happiness, cognitive performance, and aggression, IPCC has said.
The climate crisis contributes to food insecurity, which can lead to malnutrition, undernutrition, obesity; and disease susceptibility in low- and middle-income countries, IPCC has said with “high confidence”. Populations exposed to extreme weather and climate events may consume inadequate or insufficient food, leading to malnutrition and increasing the risk of disease. Children and pregnant women experience disproportionately higher nutrition and health impacts.
For the first time, IPCC has explained the link between the climate crisis and mental health conditions and conflict. “Children and adolescents, particularly girls, as well as people with existing mental, physical, and medical challenges and elderly people, are particularly at risk. Mental health impacts are expected to arise from exposure to high temperatures, extreme weather events, displacement, malnutrition, conflict, climate-related economic and social losses, and anxiety and distress associated with worry about climate change,” the report states.
The climate crisis also impacts the risk for conflict by undermining food and water security, income and livelihoods. An excess of 250,000 deaths per year by 2050 attributable to the climate crisis is projected just due to heat, undernutrition, malaria, and diarrheal disease, with more than half of this excess mortality projected for Africa (compared to a 1961-1991 baseline).
Unlike a pandemic like Covid-19 when there is a sudden spike in deaths and infections, the massive health impact of the climate crisis is unfolding gradually. But there is hardly any documentation of these impacts in the health sector. Experts in India, for example, have been asking for daily all-cause mortality numbers to be released so that spikes in deaths during extremely high-temperature days can be tracked.
There is also little to no discussion on how can poor and marginalised communities can be protected from extreme heat and water scarcity in cities and villages. The response time to the crisis is closing very soon.
IPCC has also flagged that the adaptation capacities of humans are not equitable.
Global hotspots of high human vulnerability are found particularly in West, Central and East Africa, South Asia, Central and South America, Small Island Developing States and the Arctic, IPCC has underlined again with “high confidence”.
“Vulnerability of ecosystems and people to climate change differs substantially among and within regions, driven by patterns of intersecting socio-economic development, unsustainable ocean and land use, inequity, marginalization, historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism, and governance. Approximately 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change,” the report has said.
The IPCC is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations responsible for advancing knowledge on the human-induced climate crisis. The report in question has been drafted by 270 scientists from 67 countries.
According to the Stockholm Environment Institute, the IPCC report preparation starts with governments formally approving the outline and ends with the approval of the Summary for Policy Makers and the acceptance of the rest of the report. Governments own the reports. That intergovernmental ownership is crucial within the context of the global climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The IPCC reports provide a collective foundation for these negotiations, which cannot then be undermined by negotiators challenging the scientific basis on which all countries have agreed.
From the climate crisis to air pollution, from questions of the development-environment tradeoffs to India’s voice in international negotiations on the environment, HT’s Jayashree Nandi brings her deep domain knowledge in a weekly column
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