Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change pp 47–66
This chapter reviews the emerging importance of pollen allergies in relation to ongoing climate change. Allergic diseases have been increasing in prevalence over the last decades, partly as the result of the impact of climate change. ...Increased sensitisation rates and more severe symptoms have been the partial outcome of: increased pollen production of wind-pollinated plants resulting in long-term increased abundance of pollen in the air we breathe; earlier shifts of airborne pollen seasons making occurrence of allergic symptoms harder to predict and deal with efficiently; increased allergenicity of pollen causing more severe health effects in allergic individuals; introduction of new, invasive allergenic plant species causing new sensitisations; environment-environment interactions, such as plants and hosted microorganisms, i.e. fungi and bacteria, which comprise a complex and dynamic system, with additive, presently unforeseeable influences on human health; environment-human interactions, as the consequence of a combination of environmental factors, like air pollution, global warming, urbanisation and microclimatic variability, which create a multi-resolution spatiotemporal system that requires new processing technologies and huge data inflow in order to be thoroughly investigated. We suggest that novel, real-time, personalised pollen information services, like mobile-app risk alerts, must be developed to provide the optimum first line of allergy management.
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The policy brief focuses on four key areas for intervention - air pollution, energy, transport and food systems. Air pollution causes 7 million deaths annually, and is a leading cause of both NCDs and climate change, thus all interventions to reduce air pollution have a positive impact on both human... and planetary health. In the energy sector, transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is if vital importance to improving health, with mortality rates due to coal-generated electricity 1,000 times higher than for wind-generated electricity.
Promoting active transport such as walking and cycling in place of motorised transport has the dual benefit of reducing both air pollution and physical activity. Livestock production alone accounts for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, with added emissions from food which are highly process and transported over long distances, and thus locally sourced plant based diets both prevent NCDs and promote human and planetary health.
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The climate crisis has many consequences – among them widespread health impacts that will lead to immense societal, ecological, and economic harm.
Over the past two decades multiple large-scale reviews on climate change and health have made clear the need for a multi-sectoral approach to target t...he drivers and impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation. Despite this abundance of scientific evidence underscoring urgency of action, policy implementation responses lag behind. Even at COP26, itself delayed due to an ongoing pandemic, health continues to be considered by many countries a problem independent from climate and environment.
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Learnings from the COVID-19 evidence response and recommendations for the future.
Reflections and recommendations from the evidence synthesis community.
This guideline aims to improve the quality of essential, routine postnatal care for women and newborns with the ultimate goal of improving maternal and newborn health and well-being. It recognizes a “positive postnatal experience” as a significant end point for all women giving birth and their n...ewborns, laying the platform for improved short- and long-term health and well-being. A positive postnatal experience is defined as one in which women, newborns, partners, parents, caregivers and families receive information, reassurance and support in a consistent manner from motivated health workers; where a resourced and flexible health system recognizes the needs of women and babies, and respects their cultural context.
This is a consolidated guideline of new and existing recommendations on routine postnatal care for women and newborns receiving facility- or community-based postnatal care in any resource setting.
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The WHO Global strategy on human resources for health: workforce 2030 encourages development partners and global health initiatives to leverage their support to health systems in countries to sustainably strengthen the health workforce. To assess the impact of these investments, a methodology was de...veloped and pilot tested by WHO.
The impact assessment tool (consisting of an MS Excel calculator with two subsets) supports users to:
• assess and quantify the health impact of HRH investments made in the context of HIV, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria programmes through their modelled effect on health service coverage of these three diseases; and
• provide aggregate indicative estimates of the range of health workers required to attain high coverage of selected health services.
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The Lancet, Planetary Health Volume 5, ISSUE 11, e766-e774, November 01, 2021
Increasing human demand for water and changes in water availability due to climate change threatens water security worldwide. Additionally, exploitation of water resources induces stress on freshwater environments, leadi...ng to biodiversity loss and reduced ecosystem services. We aimed to conduct a spatially detailed assessment of global human water stress for low to high environmental flow (EF) protection.
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In 2015, 26% of the deaths of 5.9 million children who died before reaching their fifth birthday could have been prevented
through addressing environmental risks – a shocking missed opportunity. The prenatal and early childhood period represents
a window of particular vulnerability, where enviro...nmental hazards can lead to premature birth and other complications,
and increase lifelong disease risk including for respiratory disorders, cardiovascular disease and cancers. The environment
thus represents a major factor in children’s health, as well as a major opportunity for improvement, with effects seen in every
region of the world.
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This open access book not only describes the challenges of climate disruption, but also presents solutions. The challenges described include air pollution, climate change, extreme weather, and related health impacts that range from heat stress, vector-borne diseases, food and water insecurity and ch...ronic diseases to malnutrition and mental well-being.
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An interdisciplinary study within the framework of the dialogue project on the contribution of the Catholic Church to a socio-ecological transformation.
The study examines the obstacles to the implementation of the socio-ecological transformation and develops recommendations for action.
National-scale databases and reliability issue
Background report
Front. Public Health, 30 April 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.628744
Published: November 24, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000938
Climate change is expected to have complex effects on infectious diseases, causing some to increase, others to decrease, and many to shift their distributions. There have been several important advances in understanding the ...role of climate and climate change on wildlife and human infectious disease dynamics over the past several years. This essay examines 3 major areas of advancement, which include improvements to mechanistic disease models, investigations into the importance of climate variability to disease dynamics, and understanding the consequences of thermal mismatches between host and parasites. Applying the new information derived from these advances to climate–disease models and addressing the pressing knowledge gaps that we identify should improve the capacity to predict how climate change will affect disease risk for both wildlife and humans.
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Environment International Volume 86, January 2016, Pages 14-23
Climate change refers to long-term shifts in weather conditions and patterns of extreme weather events. It may lead to changes in health threat to human beings, multiplying existing health problems. This review examines the scientific e...vidences on the impact of climate change on human infectious diseases. It identifies research progress and gaps on how human society may respond to, adapt to, and prepare for the related changes. Based on a survey of related publications between 1990 and 2015, the terms used for literature selection reflect three aspects — the components of infectious diseases, climate variables, and selected infectious diseases. Humans' vulnerability to the potential health impacts by climate change is evident in literature. As an active agent, human beings may control the related health effects that may be effectively controlled through adopting proactive measures, including better understanding of the climate change patterns and of the compound disease-specific health effects, and effective allocation of technologies and resources to promote healthy lifestyles and public awareness. The following adaptation measures are recommended: 1) to go beyond empirical observations of the association between climate change and infectious diseases and develop more scientific explanations, 2) to improve the prediction of spatial–temporal process of climate change and the associated shifts in infectious diseases at various spatial and temporal scales, and 3) to establish locally effective early warning systems for the health effects of predicated climate change.
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Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral disease that occurs mainly in the tropics and subtropics but has a high potential to spread to new areas. Dengue infections are climate sensitive, so it is important to better understand how changing climate factors affect the potential for geographic spread and futu...re dengue epidemics. Vectorial capacity (VC) describes a vector's propensity to transmit dengue taking into account human, virus, and vector interactions. VC is highly temperature dependent, but most dengue models only take mean temperature values into account. Recent evidence shows that diurnal temperature range (DTR) plays an important role in influencing the behavior of the primary dengue vector Aedes aegypti. In this study, we used relative VC to estimate dengue epidemic potential (DEP) based on the temperature and DTR dependence of the parameters of A. aegypti. We found a strong temperature dependence of DEP; it peaked at a mean temperature of 29.3°C when DTR was 0°C and at 20°C when DTR was 20°C. Increasing average temperatures up to 29°C led to an increased DEP, but temperatures above 29°C reduced DEP. In tropical areas where the mean temperatures are close to 29°C, a small DTR increased DEP while a large DTR reduced it. In cold to temperate or extremely hot climates where the mean temperatures are far from 29°C, increasing DTR was associated with increasing DEP. Incorporating these findings using historical and predicted temperature and DTR over a two hundred year period (1901-2099), we found an increasing trend of global DEP in temperate regions. Small increases in DEP were observed over the last 100 years and large increases are expected by the end of this century in temperate Northern Hemisphere regions using climate change projections. These findings illustrate the importance of including DTR when mapping DEP based on VC.
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One Earth Perspective. Cell Press
February 2020Earth's Future 8(2):e2019EF001377.The water planetary boundary attempts to provide a global limit to anthropogenic water cycle modifications, but it has been challenging to translate and apply it to the regional and local scales at which water problems and management typically occur. We... develop a cross‐scale approach by which the water planetary boundary could guide sustainable water management and governance at subglobal contexts defined by physical features (e.g., watershed or aquifer), political borders (e.g., city, nation, or group of nations), or commercial entities (e.g., corporation, trade group, or financial institution).
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PNAS 2022 Vol. 119 No. 7 e2109217118
Journal of Land Use Science, 16:3, 223-239, DOI: 10.1080/1747423X.2021.1933226
The authors conduct an integrated survey of Antimicrobial Resistant Organisms (AMR) in drinking water, wastewater and surface water in three settings in Bangladesh: rural households, rural poultry farms, and urban food markets. Results show that untreated water discharged from rural households, poul...try farms and urban markets are major contributors to surface water pollution and antibiotic resistant bacteria genes, calling for increased surveillance and monitoring.
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