Presentation by Mala Rao, OBE, Professor of International Health at the University of East London, at the SHOES conference in Sandwell, March 28 2014

1. Mala Rao OBE
Professor of International Health
University of East London
SHOES, March 2014
The Health Impacts of
Climate Change

2. Climate Change 2014:
Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
• IPCC meeting in Japan this week to
finalise the report
• Likely to focus on human impacts
• Will warn that people in Asia could
face some of the worst effects of
global warming
• Flooding, famine and rising sea levels
will put hundreds of millions at risk in
one of the world's most vulnerable
regions
Robin McKie, science editor
The Observer, Saturday 22 March 2014 21.21 GMT

3. South Asia – The context
• home to over 1.7 billion people
• almost a quarter of the world’s
population.
• by 2050, may have grown another
40%, to about 2.4 billion
• vulnerable coastal megacities
• endemic and widespread poverty
• poor adaptive capacity
• the effects of climate change here
will have global repercussions.
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, 2012

4. The challenges of gathering evidence
• research has focused on the medium-
term
• limited availability of high quality
quantitative data and uncertainty of
modeling
• focus mainly includes heat waves,
extreme weather events, flooding, vector
borne and diarhoeal disease, water
scarcity, drought

5. Tertiary level impacts
• the tertiary effects at the intersection of
complex systems and large-scale societal
changes
• do not fit easily into mathematical models
• they result from interplay between people,
politics and ecology
• 2014 IPCC focus on tertiary impacts is
welcome

6. Food security
India is home to 1/6th of the world’s population, while only endowed with
1/25th of the world’s available water resources.
Source: Fresh water under threat,SouthAsia: Vulnerability of freshwater resources to environmental change, United Nations Environment Programme

7. Food security
• crop yields projected to decrease by 5-
30% in Asia by 2050
• farmer suicides in India at an all time high
• 132 million additional people likely to risk
chronic hunger
• under-nutrition in S Asia causes almost a
million deaths of children under a year old
• numbers going hungry may increase by 1%
for every 2-2.5% rise in food prices
IPCC, 2007

8. Climate Conflicts
• Darfur, Sudan
• Conflicts between communities
Source: . A Climate of Conflict, The links between climate change,
peace and war. London: International Alert Smith and Vivekananda,
2007

9. Migration
• Many islands under
serious risk of
inundation
• Coastal flooding,
increasing salinity of
coastal freshwaters
and declining fish
populations
• Maldives preparing
for internal
migration
Source: Human health. Climate change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working
Group II to the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge Univ Press. Republic of Maldives, 2007

10. The impacts of migration on health
• trauma, undernutrition,
water and food scarcity,
transmission of
infectious disease,
mental distress, poor
reproductive health and
child health
Zimmerman et al., 2011

11. Economic instability
• increasing globalization - complex, tortuous
and vulnerable international supply chains
• an example - flight bans caused by the
eruption of an Icelandic volcano in 2010
• sea level rises, extreme weather events
may disrupt ports and airports, affecting
freight transport, including medicines
• floods in Uttarakhand, India, 2013 damaged
roads, transport of health supplies,
undermined access to health facilities,
worsening the humanitarian impact of the
disaster
Committee on Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Social and Political Stresses, 2012, Rao and Beckingham, 2013, Foresight
International Dimensions of Climate Change, 2011