PARIS —
Deadlier than COVID, or even rivalling cancer? Researchers have been
increasingly attempting to calculate the effect climate change will have on
health if the world does not act quickly to reduce carbon emissions.
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The
World Health Organization (WHO), which says climate change is the single biggest health
threat facing humanity, has called for the issue to be “front and center” in
negotiations at the COP27 summit being held in Egypt.
But quantifying
the overall impact is an extremely complicated task, experts told AFP, because
global warming affects health in many different ways, from the immediate
dangers of rising heat and extreme weather to longer-term food and water shortages,
air pollution and disease.
The WHO estimates
that climate change will cause 250,000 extra deaths a year from malnutrition,
malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress between 2030 and 2050.
That is widely
thought to be a “massively conservative estimate” of the true toll, partly
because it only comes from four sources, said Jess Beagley, policy lead at the
NGO Global Climate and Health Alliance.
“Climate change
is a threat multiplier,” she told AFP. “As climate change worsens, we’re going
to see the biggest threats to human health increase.”
Nearly 70 percent
of all deaths worldwide are from
diseases that could be made worse by global
warming, according to a report this year from the IPCC, the United Nations’
panel of climate experts.
4.2 million more deaths?
Another major health threat comes from food shortages. Nearly 100
million additional people faced severe food insecurity in 2020 compared to
1981-2010, according to a report last month from The Lancet Countdown, a
leading effort to quantify
climate change’s impact on health.
Extreme drought
has increased by nearly a third over the last 50 years, it added, putting
hundreds of millions at risk of lacking access to fresh water. And air
pollution contributed to 3.3 million deaths in 2020, 1.2 million of which were
directly related to fossil fuel emissions, the report found.
Researchers have
also been sounding the alarm that warmer temperatures are pushing
virus-carrying animals like mosquitoes into new areas, increasing the spread of
existing diseases — and raising the risk of new ones jumping across to humans.
The likelihood of
dengue transmission rose by 12 percent over the last 50 years, while warming
temperatures extended malaria season in parts of Africa by 14 percent, the
Lancet Countdown report said.
Projecting into
the future, a new platform launched last week by the United Nations Development
Program and the
Climate Impact Lab warned that global warming could become
deadlier than cancer in some parts of the world.
Under the
modelling research’s worst-case scenario in which fossil fuel emissions are not
rapidly scaled back, climate change could cause death rates to increase by 53
deaths per 100,000 people worldwide by 2100 — around double the current rate
for lung cancer.
For the current
global population, that would mean 4.2 million additional deaths a year, more
than the official toll from COVID-19 in 2021.
‘Exacerbate inequality’
The Climate Impact Lab’s Hannah Hess told AFP that the projections were
probably conservative because they compared previous data on mortality and
weather with possible future temperatures, so did not include potential threats
such as vector-borne diseases.
The platform also
gave specific local projections for more than 24,000 regions worldwide. Under
the worst-case scenario, it found that in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, climate
change-related deaths could double those from all cancers by 2100.
The study did
project that death rates would fall in some northern, mostly wealthy nations,
where fewer cold spells could lead to a net improvement in health. This “speaks
even more to the potential of climate change to exacerbate inequality”, Hess
added.
There have been
calls to include such additional deaths into the “social cost of carbon”, the
price put on the harm attributable to a tonne of CO2.
Research
published in September estimated that the current price of $51 per metric tonne
was nearly four times too low, in part because it underestimated the effect of
extra deaths.
The global
charity
Wellcome Trust is among those funding further research on global
warming’s impact on health, according to its climate and health director Alan
Dangour.
Soon, “climate
change will influence every aspect of public health,” Dangour told AFP. “If we
don’t embed climate change into our thinking, we’ve completely missed the
point.”
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