Health 'first casualty' of climate change

Climate change could undermine health efforts put in place in the past few decades, according to Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi. African countries are expected to be the most adversely affected by climate change, with widespread poverty hindering their ability to adapt to extreme weather events. According to the Lancet medical journal, climate change is the greatest global health threat of the 21st century.

The World Health Organisation predicts that changing climate conditions will lead to increases in malaria, cholera and dengue fever, as well as losses of life due to extreme weather events. Addressing the first Global Health and Climate Change Summit, taking place on the side lines of the 17th Conference of the Parties in Durban, Motsoaledi said healthcare systems would be undermined if climate change was not taken into account.

He said the first area in which the effects of climate change would be detected was in people's health. It "will affect our ability to maintain basic health", and added that the issue of health had to be put firmly on the agenda. Motsoaledi said SA had drafted a climate change policy relating to human health, which set out a framework to help the country's healthcare system adapt to the effects of climate change.

He said that in the long run, the greatest health impacts might not be from acute shocks such as natural disasters, but from gradual build-up of pressure on the natural resources and social system that sustain health, which were already under stress in many parts of the world. This pressure involved the availability and quality of water resources, rising sea levels and resulting population displacement, which would give rise to increased civil war. Hugh Montgomery, part of the UK' Climate and Health Council, said that climate change was an "enforced multiplier of existing problems".

He cited the example of higher malaria prevalence, which is already a serious problem in a number of African countries. Warmer climates meant there were more mosquitoes and "malarial development is faster in warmer temperatures", Dr Montgomery said. He said climate change was not just about dollars, but also about lives, suffering and surviving. Montgomery also said the earth was projected to warm by 6°C in the next few decades if current levels of greenhouse gas emissions continued unchecked. Montgomery said humans had evolved to a niche range of temperatures and as temperatures rose, mortality rates would also rise.

He said that developed nations felt they were secure from the effects of climate change, in a global economy everyone would be affected. The summit's declaration calls on negotiating governments to deliver a binding agreement by 2014, which "places the protection of human health as a primary objective of any agreement". It also calls for a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions to "avoid a global public health disaster".

Business Day, 5 December 2011
By: Sarah Wild