Climate change likely to widen health inequities: WHO paper
by The Daily Eye Team August 29 2014, 8:40 am Estimated Reading Time: 1 min, 2 secsPoorer populations and children will be disproportionately affected? Emphasising the urgent need to fight climate changes, the World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday suggested several measures to make the global health system more resilient to climate change and minimise its consequences on human health. The technical briefing, presented at the WHO conference on health and climate, titled Strengthening Health Resilience to Climate Change, the apex health body highlighted the possible impact of climate change on health.
This paper was used as the basis of discussions in the ongoing conference. Quoting Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the paper highlighted a few possible scenarios in order to describe the range of possible future climate conditions of future emissions that it considers equally plausible. It says that emissions of greenhouse gases are currently following the higher end of this range. By the end of the century, these are projected to lead to concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are almost four times that of pre-industrial levels.
This would be expected to bring a 3.7?4.8?C rise in global mean surface temperatures (with a range of 2.5?C to 7.8?C), and severe disruptions to precipitation patterns, as well as the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.