Climate Change

People being rescued from floods in China GHealth News - Two weeks of climate talks in Germany have ended in acrimony between rich and poor countries over cash for climate damage. Developing countries say they are reeling from climate change caused by richer countries' emissions over hundreds of years. They hoped to get compensation onto the official agenda for discussions by world leaders in November. But here in Bonn they couldn't get the US and the European Union to agree. "The climate emergency is fast becoming a catastrophe," said Conrod Hunte, lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). "Yet within these walls the process feels out of step with reality, the pace feels too slow," he told delegates at the end of the meeting. Developing nations ...

GHealth News - Climate change poses serious risks to mental health and well-being, concludes a new WHO policy brief, launched today at the Stockholm+50 conference. The Organization is therefore urging countries to include mental health support in their response to the climate crisis, citing examples where a few pioneering countries have done this effectively. The findings concur with a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in February this year. The IPPC revealed that rapidly increasing climate change poses a rising threat to mental health and psychosocial well-being; from emotional distress to anxiety, depression, grief, and suicidal behavior. “The impacts of climate change are increasingly part of our daily lives, and there is very little ...

By Matt McGrath Rising temperatures are linked to more extreme weather events such as these floods in China UK Met Office researchers say that there's now around a fifty-fifty chance that the world will warm by more than 1.5C over the next five years. Such a rise would be temporary, but researchers are concerned about the overall direction of temperatures. It's almost certain that 2022-2026 will see a record warmest year, they say. The Met Office is the UK's national meteorological service. As levels of warming gases in the atmosphere have accrued rapidly over the past three decades, global temperatures have responded by rising in step. In 2015, the world's average temperature first went 1C above the pre-industrial levels, which are generally thought of as the temperat...

GHealth News - Climate change poses a serious threat to human health that calls for urgent action and global collaboration on scales seen in the COVID-19 response, says the World Health Organization (WHO). "If we don't take action today on planet health, we are putting our future health at risk. And when health is at risk, everything is at risk. That's what we have learned from COVID-19," Takeshi Kasai, WHO regional director for the Western Pacific Region said addressing a virtual press conference from Manila on 7 April, World Health Day. "Climate crisis is also a health crisis since climate change affects health in many different ways," Kasai said, emphasizing the need to build sustainable, climate-resilient health systems. "Climate crisis is also a health crisis since climate ch...

By Matt McGrath Many of the impacts of global warming are now simply "irreversible" according to the UN's latest assessment. But the authors of a new report say that there is still a brief window of time to avoid the very worst. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that humans and nature are being pushed beyond their abilities to adapt. Over 40% of the world's population are "highly vulnerable" to climate, the sombre study finds. But there's hope that if the rise in temperatures is kept below 1.5C, it would reduce projected losses. Just four months on from COP26, where world leaders committed themselves to rapid action on climate change, this new UN study shows the scale of their task. "Our report clearly indicates that places where people live and wo...

Egypt will host the COP27 United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2022, the country's environment ministry said on Thursday. The North African country will hold the conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, it added. The decision was taken during this year's conference, COP26, which is hosted by the United Kingdom in Glasgow. Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi declared in September his country's interest in hosting the COP27 on behalf of the African continent. The country would work to make the conference "a radical turning point in international climate efforts in coordination with all parties, for the benefit of Africa and the entire world," he said at the time. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was selected on Thursday to host the COP28 international ...

If you thought the COVID pandemic was disruptive and deadly, climate change will be so much worse. So said a slew of panelists Tuesday at the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, warning about escalating climate-linked health threats such as disease, heatstroke and air pollution. But they also called out the health systems in rich nations as part of the problem, with the healthcare sector responsible for up to 5% of global carbon emissions. “We need to recognize the role of health systems as emitters,” said Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary of health. “We cannot stand back and only tell others what they should do to protect our patients.” The main sources of emissions from the healthcare sector include the manufacture and transport of medical goods, as well as the construct...

By: JULIA GILLARD The damaging effects of a warming planet are not limited to the environment. The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) currently underway in Glasgow is an ideal opportunity for world leaders to demonstrate that they understand that global warming is a health crisis, and that they are learning from the pandemic response. The threat COVID-19 poses to human health is now well understood around the world. In contrast, the enormous health threat of global warming, with its broad array of persistent impacts on our well-being, is under-recognized and poorly understood. Yet climate change is harming human health right now. During the 2020 monsoon season in Bangladesh, for example, water flooded a quarter of the country. More than 1.3 million homes we...

Sugar-cane cutters in Nicaragua, where abnormally high numbers of agricultural workers suffer from CKDu (chronic kidney disease of unknown causes). Photograph: Ed Kashi/VII Chronic kidney disease linked to heat stress could become a major health epidemic for millions of workers around the world as global temperatures increase over the coming decades, doctors have warned. More research into the links between heat and CKDu – chronic kidney disease of uncertain cause – is urgently needed to assess the potential scale of the problem, they have said. Unlike the conventional form of chronic kidney disease (CKD), which is a progressive loss of kidney function largely seen among elderly people and those afflicted with other conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, epidemics of CKDu h...