Global warming is posing immediate health hazards around the world and in the United States, from kidney disease to dengue fever, two new studies say.
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Crop yields are declining. Tropical diseases like dengue fever are showing up in unfamiliar places, including in the United States. Tens of millions of people are exposed to extreme heat.
These are the stark findings of a wide-ranging scientific report that lays out the growing risks of climate change for human health and predicts that cascading hazards could soon face millions more people in rich and poor countries around the world.
The report, published Wednesday in the public health journal The Lancet, incorporates the work of 24 academic institutions and United Nations agencies and follows a major climate assessment issued last week by the United States government. The two studies represent the most serious warnings to date that climate change is posing a series of interconnected health risks for the global population.
“We don’t see these health impacts individually,” said Kristie L. Ebi, a professor of global health at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the Lancet study. “We see them jointly. We see them coming at communities all at the same time.”
Among the biggest threats humans face in a warming climate is heat stress, which not only kills people directly but can also lead to kidney and cardiovascular disease, the report noted. Higher temperatures can also diminish people’s ability to work, particularly in agriculture, leading to tens of billions of hours of lost labor capacity each year.
Most worrying, according to the authors, is the compounding effect of extreme weather events that are exacerbated by climate change. Heat waves, floods and storms can batter the very public health systems that are meant to help people, the report says. A failure to rein in emissions, it warns, could lead to disasters that “disrupt core public health infrastructure and overwhelm health services.”
The American report, called the National Climate Assessment, says that extreme rainfall could overwhelm the nation’s ailing water and sewer systems, contributing to shortages of drinkable water and increasing exposure to gastrointestinal disease. In some parts of the country, like Florida and Texas, higher temperatures will be a boon to a type of mosquito that transmits the viruses that cause dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever.
