“Today, humanity faces the intertwined challenges of obscene levels of poverty and a rapidly warming global climate,” states a new report, Up in Smoke, a collaborative effort involving many leading international charities and published last week by the New Economics Foundation, an independent, UK based think tank.
The report warns: “Globally several environmental, economic and political trends are coinciding and contributing to rising instability that exposes people and biodiversity to greater risks and vulnerability than ever before.”
Most of the people at risk are in poor countries. The cumulative number of people affected by disasters rose to two billion in the 1990s, up from 740 million in the 1970s.
“Without a new agenda explicitly focused to reduce vulnerability, we could face a major reversal of human progress,” the report continues.
“The likelihood of attaining the millennium development goals—the world's minimum commitment to ending the worst of global poverty, hunger, ill health and disease—will be seriously reduced.”
For example, one of the main millennium development goals is to halve the proportion of hungry people by 2015, yet food production, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, will be badly affected by global warming.
Another indirect effect of global warming, the report predicts, is an increase in the range, incidence, and prevalence of vectorborne diseases such as malaria and leishmaniasis. Foodborne and waterborne diseases will also increase in prevalence as a result of warmer temperatures and extra demands on water supplies, leading to water contamination. Such effects will seriously hamper other ambitious millennium development goals such as reducing child mortality.
According to the report the three main challenges are:
- How to stop and reverse global warming;
- How to live with the degree of global warming that cannot be prevented;
- How to design a new model for human progress and development that is climate friendly and that gives everyone a fair share of the natural resources on which we all depend.
It goes on to make some urgent priorities (see box).
Andrew Simms, one of the authors of the report and policy director of the New Economics Foundation, said: “Health professionals should get serious about global warming for a number of reasons. Apart from the significant effect of the incidence and prevalence of diseases in the community, new populations may be affected by these diseases, and there will also be new diseases to deal with, even in the United Kingdom. ”
He added: “Health professionals will be essential in mapping these problems and in how we deal with them, as one of the first manifestations of global warming is the effect that it has on health.”
Up in Smoke is accessible at www.neweconomics.org/gen/
Urgent priorities for dealing with climate change
- A global risk assessment of the likely costs of adaptation to climate change in poor countries
- New funds and other resources provided by rich countries so that poor countries can adapt
- Effective and efficient arrangements to respond to the increasing burden of disasters resulting from climate change
- Development models that are based on risk reduction and on incorporating community driven strategies for preparing for and coping with disasters
- Disaster awareness campaigns, with material produced at the level of local communities and available in local languages
- Coordinated plans, from local to international levels, for relocating threatened communities, using appropriate political, legal, and financial resources