Climate Change And Public Health: Is The World At Risk?

Climate change is currently one of the most hotly (pun intended?) debated subjects across the globe. Those looking to combat global warming face denial, lack of accountability, and a multitude of misinformation; but all of this swirls around the proverbial drain with a plethora of scientific facts and disturbing evidence that bad things are happening and that us humans are definitely contributing.

Climate change has already had a variety of adverse effects on several crucial aspects of our daily lives, but one of the most concerning is the projected implications on world health. Public Health experts at The University of Nevada, Reno, are seeing climate change impact global health in three major mays: vector-borne diseases and allergies, increased environmental disasters, and widespread undernutrition and lack of food security.

There’s no doubt that temperatures have been steadily rising for decades, and along with rising temperatures comes an increase in specific types of illnesses. Scientists across the globe have already seen a specific and related spike in illnesses that are vector-borne (transmitted to humans or animals from the bites of insects like mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas.) Most of the insects (also known as vectors) that transmit these types of illnesses and allergic reactions thrive in warm, wet climates, so an overall increase in temperatures globally means an overall increase in vectors, which also means an overall increase in the diseases they carry.

This means we’ll see infections like malaria and dengue fever move out of the tropics and subtropics and spread farther north and south. It might seem like the U.S., Canada, and Europe are mostly safe from this type of spread, but that is false. These places have already seen an increase in vector-borne diseases like West Nile Virus and Lyme disease, as well as vector-borne allergens like ragweed.

Those of us who haven’t been living under a rock our entire lives have seen the impact natural disasters can have on public health and safety. In my own lifetime, the one that hit closest to home was Hurricane Katrina, and the devastation it and its subsequent flooding caused several major cities along the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Katrina was an unprecedented event, one which we’re only used to seeing every few hundred years, but it happened in the same decade as the South Asian Tsunami and the Haiti and Japan Earthquakes, all of which left death and devastation in their wakes.

When it comes to natural disasters, the risk of injury and death is apparent. However, natural disasters affect public health in multiple other ways. Both extremes of the water cycle have their own negative impacts: drought causes dehydration and loss of crops, and flooding can be equally as dangerous. Exposure to stagnant, contaminated water can cause numerous diseases that can spread beyond the scope of the disaster itself, and recovery from flood and drought have chain reactions that affect that country and possibly the world.

Natural disasters also have the capability to annihilate hospitals, fire stations, police outposts, food stores, and other necessary aspects of disaster recovery itself. Aid always comes, but it often comes too little too late, and not everyone can be saved.

The fact that increased global temperatures are closely correlated to this unprecedented increase in severely devastating events should scare you, because it is only expected to get worse from here. Public Health Officials expect to see an increase in frequency and severity of natural disasters in the near future, and they worry that we won’t be able to keep up with the strain this will cause on public health programs.

Last on the list is the ways in which climate change will affect global nutrition. Most of our food is grown in the earth, with the aid of sunshine and water, and the rest of it eats things that grow in the earth. Almost every source of reliable nutrition us humans have is dependent on a delicate balance with the environment, and if we push that balance too far in either direction, we could see numerous negative outcomes.

Rising temperatures mean decreased food security. Droughts and decreased access to uncontaminated water will lead to crop shortages, which will lead to overall food shortages worldwide. We’ll see an increase in food prices over the next few decades, but worse is the increase in starvation and malnutrition that come with it.

It’s not just our crops that are in danger; livestock that rely on human-grown crops for their own nutrition will dwindle away. One of the largest impacts scientists have seen so far is actually on fisheries. There has already been a massive loss in biodiversity and overall health of fish worldwide, which is especially troubling given that fish are often the main source of protein for sea-adjacent undeveloped cities and countries.

If the globe continues to grow warmer, all of the effects that have already been seen will not just increase in kind; they will snowball out of control. In certain places, they will cause almost exponential devastation. We have reached an era where advances in health and medicine have led the way for longer lifespans and better overall quality of life, but that might be just a short-lived apex on a bell curve if we don’t do everything in our power to stop climate change and its negative outcomes.