Health Impacts of Climate Change-Realities and Challenges

Climate change poses a major and largely unfamiliarchallenge.Over the last 50 years, human activities particularly the burning of fossil fuels have released sufficient quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to trap additional heat in the lower atmosphere and affect the global climate.This paperdiscussess the process of global climate change, its current and future impacts on human health, and how our societies can lessen those adverse impacts, via adaptation strategies and by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the last 100 years, the world has warmed by approximately 0.75oC. Each of the last 3 decades has been successively warmer than any preceding decade since 1850. Sea levels are rising, glaciers are melting and precipitation patterns are changing. Extreme weather events are becoming more intense and frequent. The Lancet report cites research estimating that cutting carbon emissions would cut premature deaths from air pollution by 500,000 a year in 2030, 1.3m in 2050 and 2.2m in 2100, particularly in the heavily polluted cities of India and China. Other work in the US shows the boosts to human health can be worth 10 times the costs of cutting emissions. Climate Change threatens to undermine half a century of progress in global health.Climatic factors are an important determinant of various vector-borne diseases, many enteric illnesses and certain water-related diseases. Relationships between year-to-year variations in climate and infectious diseases are most evident where climate variations are marked, and in vulnerable populations