Climate change and human health

Global climate change over the coming decades of the magnitude predicted by current climate models may have a variety of deleterious health effects on the human population. Adverse health effects may also follow from the projected depletion of ozone in the stratosphere. These effects are the subject of a report prepared by a task group set up by the World Health Organization, the World Meteorological Organization, and the UN Environment Programme-Climate Change and Human Health, edited by A. J. McMichael, A. Haines, R. Slooff, and S. Kovats (Geneva: WHO, 1996; for a review see PDR 22, no.4). The report briefly summarizes the consensus views of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on future climate trends and then assesses potential routes of impact on health-directly through temperature changes and more frequent extreme weather events, and indirectly through (for example) changes in the geographic range of disease vectors or the ''social-demographic disruptions caused by rising sea level.'' The task group's recommendations principally call for closer monitoring of health outcomes and for long-term, multidisciplinary research. The excerpt below is the initial section (pp. 215-217) of Chapter 10: Recommendations and conclusions. Through overlaps in authorship and in the research base drawn on, the WHO report substantially resembles the treatment of the health effects of climate change in the 1995 IPCC report (see Chapter 18: Human population health, in Climate Change 1995. Impacts, Adaptations and Mitigation of Climate Change: Scientific-Technical Analyses. Contribution of Working Group II to the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).