Every change in the physical and social environment has an effect on health and on the capacity of individuals and societies to cope with health problems. This applies to climate change.
A lot of research has been done to catalogue the potential health effects of climate change. This body of work has been assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and is set out in its Third Assessment Report (IPCC 2001). A recent report by the World Health Organisation provides a more detailed assessment (WHO 2003). Both reports stress difficulties of precise and localised projections but conclude that climate change will present major and largely unfamiliar challenges.
The reports outline a number of potential impacts. The distribution of organisms and of animal vectors may change, resulting in the spread of malaria and other infectious diseases (see Pachauri, this Bulletin). Health may be affected by changes in nutrition (see Devereux and Edwards, this Bulletin) and access to clean water (see Burton and May and Denton, this Bulletin). Climate-related extreme events may have deleterious health consequences. The social stresses associated with adjustment to climate change reduce a country’s capacity to deal with illness. This article does not review these changes and the ways that health systems may have to adapt to cope with them. Instead, it sets these health-related challenges in a broader perspective with the aim of generating discussion about how climate change might “fit” with our evolving notions of what kind of policy interventions enhance development, poverty alleviation and the ability to cope with major transitions.
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This article comes from the IDS Bulletin 35.3 (2004) Health in a Changing World
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