As the health threats posed by climate change reach record-breaking levels, an international team of scientists has urged governments to redirect the trillions of dollars spent on fossil fuels towards protecting people’s lives and livelihoods. Their message is relevant to SA, which still relies heavily on coal-burning power plants.
Last year was the hottest year on record, and people were exposed to on average 50 more days of health-threatening temperatures than would have been expected without climate change, according to the eighth annual report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, published on Wednesday.
Extreme drought affected nearly half of the world’s land, and the higher frequency of heatwaves and droughts was associated with 151-million more people experiencing food insecurity than annually between 1981 and 2010, it said.
“Once again, last year broke climate change records — with extreme heatwaves, deadly weather events, and devastating wildfires affecting people around the world,” said Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown: Tracking progress on health and climate change, an international research collaboration based at University College London.
The publication comes hard on the heels of the latest UN Emissions Gap report, which last week warned that current climate policies will result in global warming of as much as 3.1ºC above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century if governments do not do more to curb planet-warming emissions.
“The relentless expansion of fossil fuels and record-breaking greenhouse gas emissions compounds these dangerous health impacts and is threatening to reverse the limited progress made so far, and put a healthy future further out of reach,” said Romanello. Rather than scaling back support for fossil fuels, many governments have increased subsidies for fossil fuels in response to rising energy prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, says the report.
Ten of the 15 indicators tracking health threats reached concerning new levels in 2023. For example, heat-related deaths of adults over the age of 65 have increased 167% since the 1990s, with the “vast majority” of this increase related to rising temperatures associated with climate change, said Romanello.
Along with rising temperatures and drought, the world has experienced an increase in “extreme precipitation” events, increasing the risk of flooding, infectious diseases and water contamination. The total yearly value of economic losses linked to physical assets damaged by extreme weather events between 2019 and 2023 stood at an estimated $227bn.
Darshnika Lakhoo, a research clinician in the Wits Planetary Health Division, said the report should have included more scientists from Africa and from other low- and middle-income countries. There is only one African contributor — from Gambia’s Medical Research Centre — listed among the paper’s authors.
The lack of representation from low- and middle-income countries influenced the choice of indicators, said Lakhoo.
For example, the proportion of people aged 65 (and at increased risk of heat-related mortality) was not a priority for most African countries as they had relatively young populations, she said.
“We need to think about very different vulnerable populations. In SA, historically disadvantaged populations living in really densely populated areas are at really high risk,” she said, citing research that found the temperatures inside the homes of pregnant women in informal settlements in Tshwane rose to a dangerous high of 46ºC during a heatwave.
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