FACT SHEET
Climate change and health
1. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. It not only threatens to change our way of life, but it will have a huge impact on health and human suffering on a global scale.
2. Without urgent, immediate action through changes in lifestyle and attitude, the effects on the global climate will be abrupt and irreversible, causing more frequent and more intense heatwaves, rainstorms, tropical cyclones and surges in sea level this century.
3. The health of millions will be affected as they face disease, poverty and hunger if arable lands become unworkable through changes in temperature, rainfall patterns and rising sea levels.
Example - The health of millions of people in Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta region are at risk. The World Bank Global Monitoring Report shows that if there is a 1 meter rise in sea level, Viet Nam will be the MOST affect country in the world – displacing millions of people from their home and land.
4. A scarcity of fresh and safe water could result in higher rates of diarrhoeal diseases, typhoid fever, malnutrition, skin diseases, food poisoning and other complications.
5. Climate-sensitive diseases are among the largest global killers. Diarrhoea, malaria and malnutrition causes more than 3 million deaths globally.
6. Improving our response to disease and surveillance is vital. As climates rapidly change, the risk of infectious disease rises – as humans and animals seek new territory, and the diseases they carry also spread further.
Example - warmer weather means the geographical reach of the mosquito is expanding. It also means the mosquitoes’ breeding cycle is shortening, allowing them to multiply at a much faster rate and to pose an even greater threat of disease. The exceptionally high number of dengue cases now being seen in Asia may be giving us a glimpse of what could lie ahead.
7. Health professionals are on the front line in dealing with the health impacts of climate change. The most vulnerable populations are those who live in poor countries where the health system already struggles to detect, control and treat infectious diseases. Health conditions, including malaria, dengue haemorrhagic fever, protein–energy malnutrition and diarrhoea are the biggest killers in these countries.
8. The government needs to put human health at the core of their climate-change policies. This does not mean establishing new and separate structures. Viet Nam must strengthen and reform current systems, with particular emphasis on clean water, immunization, disease surveillance, mosquito control and disaster preparedness.
9. Just two weeks ago WHO adopted a climate change resolution at its annual World Health Assembly. Members States (including Vietnam) promised to commit their own Ministries of Health to take action to protect health from climate change. The resolution called on the health sector to scale up projects that will limit the impacts of climate change on health; to raise global awareness of the impacts of health from climate change at national and international levels; and to boost political attention and action.
10. Without these crucial measures, climate change threatens to reverse the progress Viet Nam has made in recent years in fighting diseases and poverty. It will also widen the gap in health terms between the richest and poorest. This is not only unfair, it is unacceptable.
Climate change is:
- real
- accelerating
- threatening all of us