Africa: Global Climate Changes Pose A Serious Health Risk, Say UN

By staff Writer 

Global climate change poses a major health risk, as extreme weather and rising temperatures could claim hundreds of thousands of lives and spread diseases, warned United Nations (UN).

Addressing a three-day conference in Geneva Switzerland, dubbed; ‘Folding together climate and health issues’, which started on Wednesday August 27, Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, head of the climate change team at the World Health Organization (WHO) said climate change was no longer only an environmental issue.

UN agency’s objective is to put health matters in the spotlight at a special UN Climate Summit to be held in New York, USA on September 23.

Campbell-Lendrum was the lead author of the health chapter in a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which painted a bleak picture.

"If we don't act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions we'll be living on a planet which is basically in many important respects unsuitable, in many locations, for health," he told the press.

Climate change affects a host of health-linked resources, such as clean air, safe drinking water, food and shelter. Warmer temperature and altered rainfall patterns may also extend the range of mosquitoes that spread malaria, dengue and chikungunya.

According to WHO statistics, at current rates of change, an additional 250,000 lives could be lost per year between 2030 and 2050, with poor nations such as African countries continuing to bear the brunt.

Malnutrition, which already kills 3.1 million people per year, would be to blame for 95,000 of those deaths.

Experts point to increasingly frequent, extreme and lengthy droughts in traditionally hard-hit regions, and the risk of water shortages elsewhere, all affecting agriculture.

"The prospects for rain-fed agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa are highly dubious," warns Alistair Woodward, a fellow IPCC report author.

Malaria, which currently kills 800,000 people annually, most of them children from Sub-Saharan Africa under the age of five, could claim extra 60,000 lives per year.

Malaria is strongly influenced by climate change, with studies showing that warming enables the mosquitoes to breed, spread and flourish at more northerly and southerly latitudes and ever-higher altitudes.

Diarrhoea and Cholera evolve into large scale epidemics in poor nations, which comprise mostly of African countries, would cause 48,000 additional deaths, due both to a scarcity of safe water in some regions and to increasing floods that contaminate supplies elsewhere.

Diarrhoea and Cholera currently kills over 600,000 children under the age of five every year.

WHO also said that extreme heat contributes to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, notably among the elderly people could kill 38,000 more people a year.

"We know that heatwaves kill people. We proved that in Europe in 2003," said Campbell-Lendrum, referring to the crisis that claimed 70,000 lives.

He said heatwaves would likely soon be far more frequent.

"What is currently considered a one-in-20-year event will become a one-in-five-year event," he warned.

Experts say heat also affects diseases linked to a sedentary lifestyle, such as cancer and diabetes.

"Heat makes physical activity in the open air actually dangerous in such countries," said Campbell-Lendrum.

WHO estimates indicate that the direct health damage costs of climate change could hit $2-4 billion annually by the year 2030.

Efforts to curb greenhouse gases pumped by fossil-fuel hungry industry and transport that stoke global warming could lower rates of pollution-related disease.

"By reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, we'll reduce pollutants, and therefore have a maximum benefit," said Maria Neira, head of WHO's public health and environment division.

Previously environmentalists and NGO’s have accused industrialist nations for increasing carbon emissions into the atmosphere and discharge of waste matter with harmful chemicals into rivers and other water bodies, which affects natural eco-system.

China, an emerging industrialized nation, dubbed the ‘Asian Tiger’, has been heavily criticize for it’s over reliance on carbon fuel to cater for its demand by the UN agency and lobby groups, pilling pressure on the government to enact laws and implement policies to curb further pollution of the environment.