Carbon pollution is warming our planet, bringing more intense weather events, greater food and water scarcity and declining healthcare conditions. Lives and livelihoods are being lost and entire infrastructures stretched to thin.
It’s happening everywhere. The true costs of carbon, we are already paying.
24 Hours of Reality , a global online event run by The Climate Reality Project, for the past two days has taken us around the world from Africa to Australia, identifying the costs of carbon pollution and the solutions to climate change that can change the course of our futures. It’s more than a global program, it’s a global call to action to put a price on carbon.
The Australian segment focused on how human health threats are exacerbated by climate change, an issue that hasn’t been given much mainstream focus.
Awareness of climate change is linked strongly with the impact it will have on our environment, but the impact on humans, especially on health is going to be huge. Climate change, from its accelerated cause to its long-lasting impacts is a very human issue.
During 24 Hours of Reality, Al Gore commented on the Australian summer that spanned 2012-2013. 123 weather records were broken in this period, including heat records, rainfall records and flooding records.
Weather forecasters had to add new colours to the map, because of the temperatures Australia was seeing. Heatwaves in Australia are now five times more likely because of global warming, and more heat related deaths are already being seen.
Bruce Esplin, the former, and first, Victorian Emergency Services Commissioner said "The heatwave part of the health equation hasn’t caught public attention, but has had the largest human cost of all these extreme weather events."
Few people may know that a large sector of the health community in Australia has for years been demanding action on climate change. A CSIRO report says “Climate change will affect human health, mostly adversely, resulting in a greater burden on the health care system, in addition to any other coexistent increases in demand (e.g. from Australia’s increasingly ageing population).”
Medical practitioners, researchers and policymakers need to prepare for changing demands on the health care system, some of which we are already seeing, for example on community services, with the industry reporting that the burden of extreme weather events places greater strain on the community sector.
Social workers, psychologists and child researchers have all joined in the discussion. Psychologists who help manage the mental health impacts on people after extreme weather events can see the full costs of carbon firsthand. The cost of damages from more extreme weather events are not just immediate, they ripple through our lives, and to the lives of our children and grandchildren. Child researchers say the health effects of climate change on children and youth are already great.
It’s difficult not to think of the wildfires that have blazed these last weeks in NSW and see a connection to climate change. Extreme weather events like wildfires pose the immediate threat of injury and death, but longer lasting environmental and health issues like air pollution and water contamination that could potentially bring unimaginable healthcare costs. Past fires in Australia have shown death rates after big bush fires due to heart disease increased 5 to ten percent. Severe storms and flooding too have been responsible for many injuries and deaths, and increases the risks of more water borne diseases.
Many Australians understand the health risks and impacts of climate change, having experienced them already, but the healthcare systems in Australia and around the world are completely unprepared for these levels of healthcare pressure.
Australia is amongst the first countries to successfully put a price on carbon (recent events make it uncertain how long it will last), yet we are still a very heavy polluting nation per person.
We need to act individually and collectively with greater ambition to cut carbon pollution, or the real price we will be paying with our health and our livelihoods. This is the cost of inaction.
Anthony McMichael said "We need to ask our selves what kind of world we will have if we let this problem fester and grow over the following years, how far will the health impacts go."
Australia can learn from these ongoing weather disasters, that no country in the world is immune, developed countries are vulnerable as well, and perhaps even more vulnerable because of their infrastructure.
The health of our planet is our future. We need to cut carbon emissions now. Let's hope 24 Hours of Reality has spread this message further throughout the world.