Health on a Heating Planet

Beyond melting glaciers and rising seas, climate change leaves its deepest scars on bodies and lives—from heat strokes to hunger, from cholera to cardiac disease

- KRISHNA GUPTA

The impact of climate change on human health is clear and evident across countries around the world. Some of the obvious ways in which this happens are extreme heat, floods, and droughts directly affecting people, and the respiratory and cardiac diseases occurring as a result of air pollution. There are indirect effects of climate change too: the rise in the frequency and intensity of infectious diseases (both vector-borne and water-borne), as well as a fall in crop yields. In this article, we will discuss these direct and indirect effects of climate change on human health.

Direct and Indirect Effects of Climate Change on Human Health

Many countries have carried out detailed vulnerability and adaptability assessments in the context of climate change. Such assessments map the impact of climate change on people, identify vulnerable populations, and then suggest adaptation policies. Here, we will broadly examine the direct and indirect effects of climate change on human health.

Direct Effects

Among the direct effects of climate change are those that impact the biological aspects of human health. Some of these are: