Heatwave death threat soars
More than 150 million vulnerable people worldwide were exposed to potentially life-threatening heatwaves last year, scientists said recently, warning that climate change posed an unprecedented global health risk.
In a worldwide stocktake of public health trends, dozens of international agencies said people over 65, those living in large cities, and sufferers of heart and lung disease were all at heightened risk of death or disability from extreme heat.
The warning came as the United Nations’ meteorological body said that the last four years including 2018 were the four warmest on record.
Globally, a total of 153 billion work hours were lost due to heat exposure in 2017, including 70% of all labour time in India, the authors said, adding that the cost of keeping people safe from heatwaves was likely to balloon as our planet warms.
The outlook is particularly dire for Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, where mounting temperatures and an ageing population produced a “perfect storm” of risk factors, according to the study’s lead author.
“For a very, very long time we have thought about climate change as something that effects the environment some time in 2100,” Nick Watts, executive director of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, said
“When you look at climate change as a public-health issue, it really turns it on its head. It isn’t just affecting polar bears or rainforests, it’s something that affects communities, children, families in the UK and Europe and around the world.”
The study team comprised experts from 27 institutions worldwide who mapped a variety of climate and health trends.
Watts and his team found that while global temperatures have risen 0.3C since the mid-1980s, for those most at risk of heat exposure the average temperature rise experienced was more than double — 0.8C.
This was attributed to a mixture of factors, including migration to cities — vulnerable to heatwaves through the “urban heat island effect”, as well as more extreme localised heat as climate change wreaks havoc on our weather systems.