Policymakers urged to sharpen focus on climate change-driven health threats

World leaders are not paying enough attention to health threats posed by climate change and squandering the opportunity to avert millions of premature deaths, a leading UK scientist told delegates at the World Science Forum (WSF) on Wednesday.

Africa is particularly vulnerable to the health effects of climate change as it has a high burden of disease, weak health systems and so many of its people live in deep poverty.

The WSF is a biannual event that attracts scientists and policy makers from around the world. This year’s event, under way this week in Cape Town, is the first in Africa.

Climate change is expected to aggravate a range of health problems, including heat stress, vector-borne diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, extreme weather events, air pollution and communicable diseases.

“There are major benefits to be had from adapting to and mitigating climate change. In the absence of effective action, there are major threats to health from climate change. And as we have just seen in Egypt at COP27 the decisions made there will unfortunately not be sufficient to take us to a safe future,” said Andrew Haines, professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

At this year’s UN climate summit at Sharm-el-Shaikh, rich countries agreed to set up a fund to pay damages to poorer countries hit hard by climatedriven floods and droughts, but the final COP27 deal drew criticism for not going far enough to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

If health was placed at the centre of climate policies that included ambitious national targets to rein in global warming to below 2°C by 2100, annual deaths due to air pollution could be reduced by more than 1.6million, and those due to dietrelated risk factors could be cut by 6.4-million, said Haines, citing a nine-country study that included SA, published in Lancet Planetary Health in 2021.

Health issues were not getting the attention or funding they merit, said European Academies’ Science Advisory Council biosciences programme director Robin Fears. “Global finance for adaptation across all sectors is small compared to finance for mitigation, and the health sector receives less than 1% of climate adaptation finance,” he said, citing a COP27 report on climate finance flows.

There was insufficient planning for the consequences of climate change on health in Africa, partly because there was so little data available, said Academy of Science of SA executive officer Roseanne Diab, delivering a presentation on behalf of the Medical Research Council’s Caradee Wright. “Very few countries have national climate change and health adaptation plans. Data needs to be collected, and surveillance systems installed so we can get much better data on what is happening in Africa,” she said.