The human ecology of climate change - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 394

Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and Chairman of the Parliamentary
Science Committee. His original goal was to discern what made nations great. He was
prompted, one day in 1933, when despondently Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald
had said to him that 'Government has become no more than an ambulance, and its
success is measured by the speed with which it deals with disaster.' (This was during
the global economic depression of the 1930s but is relevant to the 2009 depression as
well as current climate concerns.) After years of on and off contemplation Markham
concluded that climate and climatic independence was central to national success.
His assessment focused on how nations through the ages had striven to become
more independent from the environment and he argued (albeit obliquely) for the
need to address what is known today as fuel poverty. The one area of environmental
degradation from energy and health consequences he touched on concerned the urban
smogs caused by the prodigious domestic coal consumption at the time. Nonetheless,
his overall conclusion was that, to be successful, nations need to ensure (through
coal, oil and electricity consumption) that their citizens' indoor environment should
be 'ideal'. What he would have made of the indoor environment of citizens' homes
in the industrialised nations in the 21st century we will never know, as the norms
three-quarters of a century later have changed considerably. However, it is likely that
he would consider today's greenhouse and health concerns somewhat ironic.
Nearly a quarter of a century on from Markham's topic, in the 1960s, all but the
poorest of people in Britain had warm homes in winter. British biologists' concerns
arising from climate were not so much focused on human health due to temperature
but on climate and Britain's ability to feed its population; remember that rationing
from World War II only completely ended in 1950. In the 1960s scientists were
aware that the climate had changed in the past, so when in 1963 the Institute of
Biology (the professional body for UK biologists now re-branded as the Society of
Biology) in its annual major symposium, looked at the biological significance of cli-
matic change in Britain, the human health dimension was not considered. Instead
the Institute's focus was on the impact of climate change on natural and agricultural
systems (Johnson and Smith, 1964). Apart from a few specialists, only since the late
1980s have health concerns from climate change (as opposed to weather) had serious
attention.
Contemporary concerns as to climate change and health impacts have been sum-
marised by the IPCC (2001a, 2007b) and the World Health Organization (WHO,
1999, 2001a), and the impact of climate change on human health was even the theme
of WHO's World Health Day in 2008 (WHO, 2008). Indeed, the WHO recognises that
not only are health impacts from climate change per se important, but also ecosystem
degradation. A significant cause of this is climate change, as the WHO acknowledges
in its 2005 report, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being (WHO, 2005). The emerging
picture is that some populations will experience health impacts from climate change
due to
permanent or intermittent changes in disease range due to shifting climate zones
and/or extreme weather events (such as the El Ni no),
flooding, due to either sea-level rise or extreme weather events,
changes in food security, and
ecosystem degradation.