Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
generate, climate change bad for the economy, and so on. The mass media, court
decisions, experts' debate, politicians' speeches, public fears, and trust in the major
social institutions and big corporations will all play a part in balancing costs and
benefits, risks and possibilities. With climate change comes the increasing likelihood
of natural disasters in the form of floods, droughts, cyclones and hurricanes. To
address these risks, issues of resilience and vulnerability need to be factored into
governance and risk-management processes. As the IPCC has noted:
The severity of the impacts of climate extremes depends strongly on the level
of the exposure and vulnerability to these extremes (
high confidence
).
Trends in exposure and vulnerability are major drivers of changes in disaster
risk (
high confidence
). Understanding the multi-faceted nature of both exposure
and vulnerability is a prerequisite for determining how weather and climate
events contribute to the occurrence of disasters, and for designing and imple-
menting effective adaptation and disaster risk management strategies. Vulnerability
reduction is a core common element of adaptation and disaster risk management.
(2012: 8)
Box 3.2
Global warming: health risks and impacts
Recent experience of extremes of summer heat in Europe, Asia, and North America
has underscored the great threat to health when physiological thresholds are passed.
Once the human body's capacity to cope with increased thermal stress is exceeded,
risks of homeostatic failure, disease exacerbation, and death begin to rise rapidly.
This is especially the case in older people, the very young, those with underlying
cardiovascular or chronic respiratory disease, and those who are poor, uneducated,
or isolated (and therefore less likely to have access to, or take, preventive action).
Such effects are exacerbated by changes in air quality: ground level ozone levels
rise with temperature, threatening human health. The greater absolute burden of
adverse health impact from heatwaves will be in the general community, but workers
in various heat exposed workplaces, both outdoors and indoors (if unventilated), are
particularly vulnerable.
Climate change thus acts as a force multiplier, amplifying the negative health impacts
of other environmental stressors (such as land degradation, soil nitrification, depletion
of freshwater stocks, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss). Populations with high
pre-existing rates of climate sensitive diseases and conditions, such as child diarrhea,
malaria, under-nutrition, asthma, atherogenic cardiovascular disease, and extreme heat
exposures in workplace settings, could suffer large absolute increments in adverse
health impact with relatively small changes in climate. Indeed, conservative extrapola-
tion of estimates made for the year 2000 suggested that climate change is now causing
some 200,000 premature deaths each year (from under-nutrition, diarrheal disease,
malaria, and flooding), with over 90 per cent of these occurring in low income countries
(especially sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia), and 85 per cent in children under 5
years of age.
Source: McMichael
et al
. (2012).
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