How does climate change impact global health?

2023 marks 50 years of World Environment Day, a day dedicated to global activities reaffirming a commitment to the “preservation and enhancement of the environment, with a view to deepening environmental awareness”. In honor of the anniversary, we’re exploring how climate change, environment, and global health are interlinked, as well as some of the Wellcome-funded climate and health research published on Wellcome Open Research.

The impact of climate and environmental changes on health

There is no longer any doubt that our climate is changing, and these changes are already beginning to have a major impact on the environments in which we live.

We’re starting to see these environmental impacts in an increasing number of ways, including:

1. Changes in global temperatures and weather systems that cause extreme events around the world.
2. Variations in climate conditions such as temperature, rainfall, and humidity which increase the transmission and geographical scope of infectious diseases like malaria.
3. Increases in floods, fires, drought, and other weather patterns which impact the ability to grow crops and raise livestock worldwide.

These environmental changes can directly cause illness and death from things like floods, droughts, fires, malaria, and other vector-borne illnesses; or indirectly, for example, through health impacts resulting from food scarcity or poor air quality.

As a result, the World Health Organization has stated that ‘climate change is the single biggest health threat facing humanity’. In fact, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050  from malnutrition, malaria, heat stress, and diarrhea alone.

Additionally, it’s widely acknowledged that the climate crisis is unequal in its impact. The world’s most vulnerable communities projected to bear the brunt of the changing climate and its environmental impacts.

Image credit: World Health Organization

A focal point for research and funding

While it’s accepted that climate change is a major cause of concern for global health, there are still gaps in our scientific understanding of the scale of current and future effects of environmental changes on health. Many are also concerned about how our society can effectively adapt to the changes and their health impacts, and effectively mitigate them.

As such, climate and health forms one of the six key pillars for Wellcome. Wellcome aims to create a healthier and more sustainable world through evidence-based research and funding, and help protect those vulnerable communities most at risk.

The Wellcome Climate and Health programme seeks to:

1. Fill knowledge gaps by significantly increasing our understanding of the effects of climate change on human health.
2. Produce evidence to inform interventions and policies that can respond to the climate crisis and put steps in place to prevent it from getting worse.
3. Ensure that evidence is effectively used by community, national, and global policymakers.

Spotlight on climate and health research

Many Wellcome-funded researchers have already published their climate and health research with Wellcome Open Research. We’ve rounded up some of this research below.

A protocol for analyzing the effects on health and greenhouse gas emissions of implemented climate change mitigation actions

It’s crucial to understand the benefits of decarbonization on human health to improve global action and implement effective policies. However, most of the existing evidence comes from modeling studies, and little is known about how effective current actions are when implemented.

This Study Protocol outlines a study which aims to analyze evidence from mitigation actions that have been implemented across a range of sectors and scales, to identify those that can improve and sustain health while accelerating progress toward a zero-carbon economy.

A tool for assessing the climate change mitigation and health impacts of environmental policies: the Cities Rapid Assessment Framework for Transformation (CRAFT)

A growing number of cities have set ambitious targets to reach goals on sustainability, health, and climate change worldwide, but assessing the success of these goals is vital to future planning.

This Research Article presents CRAFT, a tool to rapidly assess how successful specific policy initiatives are in achieving these goals by simultaneously quantifying the environmental and health impacts of specified selected policies.

Mapping global research on climate and health using machine learning

Understanding and assessing existing evidence on the relationship between climate change, climate variability, and human health is key to implementing successful policies. However, the wide-ranging body of literature, and the speed at which it expands, can make it difficult to effectively analyze this evidence and identify global trends.

This Study Protocol outlines the development of machine learning methods to screen over 300,000 scientific articles to produce key data and trends in climate-health publishing, and to assess the validity of machine learning in this area.

Publish your climate and health research open access

Wellcome Open Research is a fully open access publishing venue and supports research publication from all Wellcome-funded scientists – at no cost to authors.

If you’d like to publish your climate and health related research with the platform, find out more about the submission process today.