Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
tion of rising malnutrition is incompatible with the assessment of rela-
tively stable yields and declining prices for agriculture, discussed in
Chapter 7.
More generally, the WHO health analysis did not factor in the ma-
jor improvements in health care and life expectancies that have already
occurred and can be expected to continue given increasing incomes. As
we saw in the last section, there is a strong historical relationship be-
tween incomes and life expectancy: Wealthier is healthier. With higher
incomes, countries upgrade their public health services and other health-
related infrastructure, and families have more resources to devote to
health care. Higher incomes pay for more doctors and nurses, more clin-
ics, and higher levels of education, and all of these are powerful contribu-
tors to better health. Moreover, the causality goes both ways because
better health improves growth as well.
The point can be seen by looking at the difference in impacts for the
two groups of countries in Table 3. The bottom half of the table shows
that the health losses from climate change for Africa are about 3 per-
cent of all losses measured in DALY terms. By contrast, the losses in
high-income countries are negligible. The estimated impacts on middle-
income countries (see the table in note 8) are much smaller than on
African countries. To the extent that poor countries grow rapidly, they
will have impacts that look more like those of middle-income and even
rich countries.
But will poor countries actually grow fast enough to outrun the
adverse health effects of climate change? We cannot be sure, but that
assumption is buried in the climate projections. The average of the inte-
grated assessment models projects that India's per capita GDP will grow
by a factor of almost 40 over the 2000-2100 period. By the end of the
next century, the low-income regions are expected to have incomes
close to those of today's high-income regions. And it is critical to recall
that this rapid economic growth is a central feature of scenarios that are
producing warming in the fi rst place (see Figure 9).
Since this point is so important, let's look in detail at the important
case of diarrheal diseases, which comprise almost half of the health
impact for Africa. Recall that the WHO study assumed that the impacts
