Climate Change to Have Significant Effects on US Health
The Environmental Protection Agency’s just published final report on the effect of climate change on US health and welfare paints a discouraging picture, especially for people living in coastal areas.
The 283-page report focuses on “impacts of global climate change, especially impacts on three broad dimensions of the human condition: human health, human settlements, and human welfare.”
While there may be fewer cases of illness and death associated with climate change in the United States than in the developing world, we nevertheless anticipate increased costs to human health and well being.
The key findings of the study:
- It is very likely that heat-related morbidity and mortality will increase over the coming decades.
- The impacts of higher temperatures in urban areas and likely associated increases in tropospheric ozone concentrations can contribute to or exacerbate cardiovascular and pulmonary illness if current regulatory standards are not attained.
- Hurricanes, extreme precipitation resulting in floods, and wildfires also have the potential to affect public health through direct and indirect health risks.
- There will likely be an increase in the spread of several food and water-borne pathogens among susceptible populations depending on the pathogens’ survival, persistence, habitat range and transmission under changing climate and environmental conditions.
- Health burdens related to climate change will vary by region.
- Climate change is very likely to accentuate the disparities already evident in the American health care system.
- Changes in precipitation patterns will affect water supplies nationwide, with precipitation varying across regions and over time. Likely reductions in snowmelt, river flows, and groundwater levels, along with increases in saline intrusion into coastal rivers and groundwater will reduce fresh water supplies.
- Communities in risk-prone regions, such as coastal zones, have reason to be concerned about potential increases in severe weather events.
- Finally, population growth and economic development is occurring in those areas that are likely to be vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Approximately half of the U.S. population, 160 million people, will live in one of 673 coastal counties by 2008. Coastal areas – particularly those on gently-sloping coasts and zones with gradual land subsidence – will be at risk for sea level rise, especially related to severe storms and storm surges.
Still, all this is not enough to convince the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, at least until after climate-change skeptic President George Bush leaves office.
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