The Lancet is the world's leading independent general medical
journal. The journal's coverage is international in focus and extends to all
aspects of human health. The
Lancet publishes the original primary research and review articles of the
highest standard.
The Lancet Countdown: Tracking
Progress on Health and Climate Change is
an international, multi-disciplinary research collaboration between academic
institutions following on from the 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and
Climate Change, which emphasised that the response to climate change could
be “the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century”.
The
Lancet Countdown was established to provide an independent, global
monitoring system dedicated to tracking the health dimensions of the impacts
of, and the response to, climate change. The Lancet Countdown tracks 41 indicators
across five domains: climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerability;
adaptation, planning, and resilience for health; mitigation actions and health
co-benefits; finance and economics; and public and political engagement.
The
key messages from the Lancet Countdown’s 2018 report are:
1.
Present
day changes in heat waves, labour capacity, vector-borne disease, and food
security provide early warning of the compounded and overwhelming impact on
public health that are expected if temperatures continue to rise. Trends in
climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerabilities show an unacceptably
high level of risk for the current and future health of populations across the
world.
2.
A
lack of progress in reducing emissions and building adaptive capacity threatens
both human lives and the viability of the national health systems they depend
on, with the potential to disrupt core public health infrastructure and
overwhelm health services.
3.
Despite
these delays, a number of sectors have seen the beginning of a low-carbon
transition, and it is clear that the nature and scale of the response to
climate change will be the determining factor in shaping the health of nations
for centuries to come.
4.
4 Ensuring a
widespread understanding of climate change as a central public health issue
will be crucial in delivering an accelerated response, with the health
profession beginning to rise to this challenge.
Climate change impacts, exposures,
and vulnerability
Vulnerability to extremes of heat
has steadily risen since 1990 in every region, with 157 million more people
exposed to heatwave events in 2017, compared with 2000, and with the average
person experiencing an additional 1·4 days of heatwaves per year over the same
period. For national economies and household budgets, 153 billion hours of
labour were lost in 2017 because of heat, an increase of more than 62 billion
hours (3·2 billion weeks of work) since 2000. The direct effects of climate
change extend beyond heat to include extremes of weather. In 2017, a total of
712 extreme weather events resulted in US$326 billion in economic losses,
almost triple the total losses of 2016.
With regard to India, the report makes the
following points:
·
From
2014-2017, the average length of heatwaves in India ranged from 3-4 days
compared to the global average of 0.8-1.8 days, and Indians were exposed to almost
60 million heatwave exposure events in 2016, a jump of about 40 million from
2012.
·
The number
of hours of labour lost jumped between 2000-2017 across India. For the
agriculture sector alone, this rose to about 60,000 million hours in 2017, from
about 40,000 million hours in 2000. Overall, across sectors India lost almost
75,000 million hours of labour in 2017, from about 43,000 million hours in
2000. The agriculture sector was more vulnerable compared to the industrial and
service sectors because workers there were more likely to be exposed to heat.
