Climate Change Costs Health, Too

Chris Buckleyn -- Interview
Reuters

Nov 10, 2006 — BEIJING (Reuters) - Deadly heatwaves and hurricanes and expanding malaria and Dengue fever infections appear to be some of the health consequences of global warming, an expert on health and environmental change said on Friday.

"The thing that excites our governments most, and the public, is the prospect of climate change doing damage to the economic system," Tony McMichael, a professor at Australia's National University, said in Beijing.

"But much worse, of course, in terms of real sustainability is damage to the life-support system," McMichael, who is studying the links between temperature rises and disease, added.

Last week, the British government issued a report warning that global warming, driven by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases that keep heat in the atmosphere, could devastate global growth, plunging the world into an economic crisis on a par with the 1930s Depression.

McMichael told Reuters that the world now recognises that global warming has probably exacerbated climate changes.

Now scientists are trying to understand how environmental change may do also more elusive harm to health by spreading less well-known diseases, drying up water, and displacing people in waves of environmental refugees, McMichael added.

"You could reasonably infer that a certain percentage of those deaths were do to the climate change component," he said.

McMichael was in Beijing to attend the launch of a new international effort to study global environmental change and health. A report for the programme offered some clues of the scale of potential havoc.

It said that 3 billion people may be threatened by Dengue fever because of climate change and urbanisation, 40 percent of the world's population may be threatened by malaria, and malnutrition due to climate change and loss of land and water could put 840 million at risk.

"Global climate change will have diverse, escalating impacts on human health," said the report.

Even if countries agreed to immediately cut emissions of greenhouse gases, changes in climate —

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