This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Across the world, people have felt the impacts of climate change firsthand. The Northern Hemisphere has had another record-breaking summer season of heat and extreme weather events.
The Southern Hemisphere now faces a summer of heat waves, flooding, wildfires and droughts. This is driven by decades of climate change, now supercharged by an unprecedented El Niño—the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, which is a cyclical warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean driven by changing trade winds, with global impacts on the climate. Extreme events driven by climate change have displaced entire communities in recent cyclones and floods in Nepal.
More than 250,000 people lost everything in a recent wildfire in Spain. In European cities, over 50,000 are reported to have died from heat in the past summer, with over 65% of those deaths directly attributable to climate change. These events underscore the reality that climate change is not some future risk scenario.
It's an immediate threat to the world's most vulnerable communities and people. As public health researchers and professionals seeking to understand and respond to the health impacts of climate change, we find this of great concern. In our own work, on the impact of heat on pregnant women and children in Africa, we have found far-reaching impacts on the health of the mother during pregnancy, on poor birth outcomes, and potentially lifelong problems for unborn children.
In an earlier study, we also found that the health care workers tasked with caring for these vulnerable communities were negatively affected by climate change. Most recently, we worked, through research with communities in South Africa, to understand the ways people try to adapt to climate change. It is increasingly clear that communities know about the risks they face from climate change.
They experience these daily. They simply do not have the resources to adapt to these changes. The World Health Organization (WHO) and leading scientists have for decades considered climate change to be the greatest health threat in the 21st century.
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