Since 1880, the global temperature has risen by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, with seventeen of the last eighteen warmest years on record occurring since 2001. In addition to that, CO2 levels in the air are at their highest in 650,000 years, Earth's ice sheets are losing 413 gigatons of mass each year, and sea levels are rising by 3.2 millimeters each year (source).
I know what you're thinking. "That's awful, and climate change is something we need to address." Well, if you needed another reason to think that, did you know that climate change affects human health as well?
Climate change can affect human health mainly in two ways: first, it can change the severity or frequency of health issues already affected by climate, and second, it can create new problems in places where it hasn't happened previously. For example, temperature extremes can exacerbate chronic conditions like cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, owing to the fact that increased CO2 promotes the growth of plants that release allergens that decrease air quality both outdoors and indoors (source). It also increases the likelihood of water-related illness in humans, because increased temperature and precipitation/runoff affect the growth, survival, spread, and virulence of water-related pathogens. These pathogens can get into our system though ingestion, inhalation, and consumption of contaminated fish (source).
One of the more interesting things I found was climate change's ability to negatively affect mental health. Many people exposed to weather-related disasters experience a significant amount of stress (which we know affects health...I hope) and can even develop clinical disorders. Additionally, those people already with mental illness are more at risk for poor physical health due to extreme heat, and people of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to experience these negative effects of climate change on mental health (source).
This is a really interesting point highlighting how many different aspects of health and the environment are affected by rising temperatures worldwide. I certainly wouldn’t have immediately thought about mental health being affected by the global temperatures, but it makes sense especially when you think about phenomena such as seasonal depression. This is a really important thing to think about because changes on such a large scale have effects that go far beyond what we initially expect.
ReplyDeleteI think that the way you integrated human health and the changing environment due to climate change was really interesting! It would also be interesting to look at how these adverse health outcomes might change with the current techniques of mitigation and adaptation. According to the NIH, mitigation refers to actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (for example, to remove carbon from the atmosphere) while adaptation refers to actions taken to reduce the environmental and health impacts. It could be interesting to see if the combination of mitigation and adaptation can decrease the prevalence and severity of climate related health effects. Perhaps by combating certain aspects of climate change, we can relook at our current public health principles and rework them to improve human health.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/climatechange/health_impacts/index.cfm