Climate crisis already causing deaths and childhood stunting, report reveals

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/31/climate-crisis-already-causing-deaths-and-childhood-stunting-report-reveals

Kate Lyons
@MsKateLyons
Wed 31 Jul 2019 05.16 BST
Last modified on Wed 31 Jul 2019 05.52 BST

Climate change is “absolutely” already causing deaths, according to a new report on the health impacts of the climate crisis, which also predicts climate-related stunting, malnutrition and lower IQ in children within the coming decades.

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Misha Coleman, one of the report’s authors, stressed that deaths were already occurring.
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“There are absolutely people dying climate-related deaths, [especially due to] heat stress right now,” she said.

“During the Black Saturday fires [in Victoria in 2009] for example, we know that people were directly killed by the fires, but there were nearly 400 additional deaths in those hot days from heat stress and heatstroke,” said Coleman.

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“Severe weather events are causing flooding, particularly in informal settlements in the Pacific, that leads to diseases including diarrhoea, that can be very serious and fatal in people, particularly children,” said John Thwaites, chair of the Sustainable Development Institute at Monash University.

The report warned that rising global temperatures would expand the habitat of mosquitos, exposing more people to diseases including dengue, chikungunya and zika, and would cause other diseases to spread into Australia, including Nipah virus, which is spread by bats, and Q fever, which is already prevalent around Townsville.

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Climate change is expected to pose particularly stark issues for childhood development, with the report citing research that shows children born to women who were pregnant while they experienced floods in Brisbane in 2011 had lower cognitive capacity (equivalent to at least 14 points on an IQ scale), smaller vocabularies and less imaginative play at the age of two.

The decreased nutritional value of staple crops as a result of higher CO2 concentration was also expected to cause stunting, anaemia and malnutrition in children, within 10 to 20 years.

“What’s the future for our children?” said Coleman. “These events are more common, more frequent and not going to become less so in a short amount of time.”