Giving Compass' Take:

• A new study released is showing that excessive temperature heat caused by climate change can affect fetal development, specifically heart defects. 

• What are some other health threats associated with climate change? How can donors help fund ways to avoid these potential defects?

• Here's another example on the relationship between climate change and public health problems. 

As climate change makes extreme heat more likely–like the 120-degree days in parts of Australia this January, or record-breaking heat that killed dozens of people in Japan and Canada last summer–it also may be doing internal damage to our bodies. A new study looked at how heat waves in the U.S. in the near future could be linked to thousands of babies born with abnormal hearts.

“We expect that pregnant women, because of climate change, will be exposed to more extreme heat in the next 10 years or 20 years,” says Shao Lin, a public health professor at the University of Albany, New York and one of the authors of the paper, which was published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association. In a previous study, Lin linked extreme heat early in pregnancy–when the baby’s heart is developing–to congenital defects. In the new paper, researchers projected future temperatures in eight regions of the U.S. between 2025 and 2035, and then calculated how many more defects might occur as heat increases.

Read the full article about how climate change impacts heart defects by Adele Peters at Fast Company