The report also reveals that climate change will disproportionally impact older people and people with pre-existing health issues or disabilities, and disadvantaged communities in Australia. The environment in which all weather events occur is not what it used to be.
Anthony Costello, director of University College London’s Institute for Global Health, stated that the results of rising ranges of carbon emissions could be very critical and probably catastrophic for human well being and survival. "We've got a real challenge particularly with carbon pollution".
Tackling the problem however could unite planetary efforts and become the greatest global health opportunity in history.
The report is a product of EPA’s Climate Change Impacts and Risks Analysis (CIRA) project in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Pacific Northwest National Lab, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and other partners.
"Will the United States benefit from climate action?"
Likewise, taking global action on warming would avoid considerable costs to the USA from damage wrought by the effects of climate change, as well as premature deaths, the EPA found. By the end of the century, such action would avoid 12,000 annual deaths from extreme temperatures in 49 USA cities, the agency said. In other words, due to the ravages of climate change, average per capita GDP for 450 million Americans would be only $208,000 instead of $212,000.
Going from diagnosis to prescribing a remedy, the doctors and scientists involved with the report-who equated the human health emergency of climate change with previous physician-led fights against tobacco use and HIV/AIDS-argue the crisis of anthropogenic climate change demands-as a matter of "medical necessity"-the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels (with special emphasis on coal) from the global energy mix"".
The 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change has been formed to map out the impacts of climate change, and the necessary policy responses, to ensure the highest attainable standards of health for populations worldwide.
The report is timed to prepare Americans for the new universal, legally-binding climate agreement that is expected to be signed by world leaders at the United Nations Climate Summit in Paris in December.
The World Medical Association welcomed the report.
CLIMATE change may wipe out the last 50 years’ gains in global health by ramping up heatwaves, flood, drought, hunger and disease, an specialist panel said Tuesday. "There's a number of reasons why these benefits would exist, but one of the most important reasons is that they increase public health".
The report lists both direct and indirect effects of climate change, citing vector-borne disease - including malaria - that will "expand their reach and death tolls" as well as indirect effects on water cleanliness and human settlements.
The issue drew the attention of Pope Francis who said in a letter to the world's Catholics last week that "Humanity is called to recognize the need for change of lifestyle, production, and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it".
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