Heatwave death threat soars for elderly, city dwellers

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PARIS, Nov 29, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – More than 150 million vulnerable people
worldwide were exposed to potentially life-threatening heatwaves last year,
scientists said Thursday, warning that climate change posed an unprecedented
global health risk.

In a worldwide stocktake of public health trends, dozens of international
agencies said people over 65, those living in large cities, and sufferers of
heart and lung disease were all at heightened risk of death or disability
from extreme heat.

The warning came as the United Nations’ meteorological body said that the
last four years including 2018 were the four warmest on record.

Globally, a total of 153 billion work hours were lost due to heat exposure
in 2017, including seven percent of all labour time in India, the authors
said, adding that the cost of keeping people safe from heatwaves was likely
to balloon as our planet warms.

The outlook is particularly dire for Europe and the eastern Mediterranean,
where mounting temperatures and an ageing population produced a “perfect
storm” of risk factors, according to the study’s lead author.

“For a very, very long time we have thought about climate change as
something that effects the environment some time in 2100,” Nick Watts,
executive director of The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, told
AFP.

“When you look at climate change as a public health issue, it really turns
it on its head. It isn’t just affecting polar bears or rainforests, it’s
something that affects communities, children, families in the UK and Europe
and around the world.”

– Agriculture struggling –

The study team comprised experts from 27 institutions worldwide who mapped
a variety of climate and health trends.

Watts and his team found that while global temperatures have risen 0.3C
since the mid-1980s, for those most at risk of heat exposure the average
temperature rise experienced was more than double — 0.8C.

This was attributed to a mixture of factors, including migration to cities
— vulnerable to heatwaves through the “urban heat island effect”, as well as
more extreme localised heat as climate change wreaks havoc with our weather
systems.

“If you just look at heat, you can see what heatwaves are doing,” said
Watts.

“If you do what we are publishing, you end up seeing that populations are
ageing, they are migrating and they are growing into the areas worst affected
by climate change.”

Around 80 percent of all work hours lost to extreme heat were in
agriculture, with India the worst hit in terms of total hours lost.

Scientists in July said climate change was making heatwaves roughly twice
as likely to occur by 2040.

Using their varied health and climate metrics, the Lancet study authors
said they had detected 18 million more at-risk people exposed to dangerous
levels of heat than just two years ago.

– ‘Overwhelmed’ –

Days before officials gather in Poland for talks aimed at finalising the
Paris agreement climate goals, the authors said governments were failing
their populations by underfunding core health infrastructure to protect
against extreme weather.

They said healthcare spending to adapt to climate change increased by 3.1
percent to o11.68 billion ($14.9 bn, 13.2 billion euros) globally, which
falls well short of the commitments made in the 2015 Paris accord.

“When you read through many governments’ heat plans they are planning for
heat as it has been historically,” said Watts.

“Unless governments are preparing plans that take into account the fact
that we are going to see a heck of a lot more of this, those plans are going
to get overwhelmed.”