Giving Compass' Take:

• A major report published predicts how climate change is degrading human health, and how it will alter our health care systems in the future. One estimate cited in the report finds that more than 3,000 additional people across the country will die prematurely because of higher temperatures by 2050.

• How can donors, policy makers, philanthropists put more emphasis on this connection? How can we ensure not only America's health care but our world's?

• Learn more about the connection between climate change and our health. 


Climate change can seem almost too big to fathom. Reports such as the recent National Climate Assessment and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent release have made waves by portraying the dire threats of a warming world, making the case that the fundamental fabric of humanity will be degraded without immediate action. But the scenarios—the biblical floods and droughts, the mass migrations of dispossessed people, the creeping seas and the retreating glaciers—have a way of short-circuiting the brain. It’s almost easier to despair or to will oneself into ignorance than to begin to grapple with the future. What are human lives when measured against the coming tempest?

Experts say mounting environmental pressures will make people sicker, and that the health-care system will play a major role in averting disaster.

Read the full article on climate change and health care by Vann R. Newkirk II at The Atlantic.