Giving Compass' Take:
- Wellcome highlights four health concerns driven by climate change that need to be central to climate action efforts.
- What role can you play in protecting health as the climate changes?
- Read about taking climate action.
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1. Climate change is affecting food quality
Global heating is making floods, droughts and heatwaves worse. These extreme weather events are changing the environment and affecting the quality of food we can produce.
Each year, over 1 million people die because they don’t get enough vegetables in their diet. As temperatures continue to rise, environmental issues will make it more difficult to produce enough nutritious vegetables to feed everyone sustainably.
2. Climate change will make infectious diseases spread faster and further
One of the major effects of global heating is the rise in extreme weather events such as flooding and droughts. Rising temperatures also affect the patterns of rainfall and snow.
3. Hot weather affects our organs, making health issues worse
Climate change has caused over a third of heat-related deaths since 1991. In 2019, research found that people aged 65 and older experienced 160 million more days of heatwave exposure than in 2016.
4. Gas emissions and wildfires are damaging air quality, and it’s bad for our lungs
Air pollution has a devastating impact on our health, killing almost 9 million people every year. Two thirds of those deaths are directly linked to fossil fuel emissions from traffic and industrial power generation.
We can save 3.5 million lives each year if we stop burning fossil fuels and reduce pollution outdoors.
Read the full article about health and climate action at Wellcome.