Climate change significantly imperils public health globally, according to a new report that chronicles the many hazards and symptoms already being seen. The authors describe its manifestations as “unequivocal and potentially irreversible.”
Heat waves are striking more people, disease-carrying mosquitoes are spreading and weather disasters are becoming more common, the authors note in the report published Monday by the British medical journal the Lancet. Climate change is a “threat multiplier,” they write, and its blows hit hardest in the most vulnerable communities, where people are suffering from poverty, water scarcity, inadequate housing or other crises.
“We’ve been quite shocked and surprised by some of the results,” said Nick Watts, a fellow at University College London’s Institute for Global Health and executive director of the Lancet Countdown, a project aimed at examining the links between climate change and public health.
The effort involved 63 researchers from two dozen institutions worldwide, including climate scientists as well as ecologists, geographers, economists, engineers, mathematicians, political scientists and experts who study food, transportation and energy.
.....Watts and his co-authors note the ways people are trying to cope with the effects of climate change — spending less time outdoors, for example — even as they warn that the world cannot rely on adaptation alone.
“If anybody says we can adapt our way out of this, the answer is, of course you can’t,” he said. “Some of the changes we’re talking about are so enormous, you can’t adapt your way out.”
Bob Doppelt's comments: Bold above is my emphasis. This is a timely report, although the mental health component is very weak. The impacts of climate change will soon swamp all ACEs, behavioral health, trauma-informed initiatives, and similar programs. As the last two paragraphs of the article state--we cannot adapt our way of out what is coming. Widespread community-based preventative Transformational Resilience building initiatives are the only alternative, must become a top priority, and we need to start now (actually we should have started10 years ago!).
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