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U.N. Program Targets Climate Change and Health in Seven Countries

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Nations seek help with problems that will worsen as climate changes

As global temperature climbs, storms intensify and small island states lose their coastal areas to the rising sea, a four-year project is starting up in seven countries to help the most vulnerable populations adapt to the health impacts of climate change.

The $4.5 million pilot effort, created by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Health Organization (WHO), is funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The GEF’s 180 member governments, including the United States, provide grants to developing countries for projects on biodiversity, climate change and related topics.

Countries participating in the effort, called “Piloting Climate Change Adaptation to Protect Human Health,” are Barbados, Bhutan, China, Fiji, Jordan, Kenya and Uzbekistan.

“We have at least one country from every one of the WHO regions and by design we picked two in each of the ecological types ― two small island states [Fiji, Barbados], two water-stressed areas [Jordan, Uzbekistan] and two highland areas [Bhutan, Kenya],” Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a specialist in climate change and health at WHO, told America.gov. China is an example of a rapidly developing and urbanizing population.

“We see this as a first step that will build capacity, allow us to learn lessons and put these and other countries in a position” to take on similar projects, he said.

“We don’t see climate change [as] an environmental issue. For us it’s very much at the heart of poverty reduction and development,” Pradeep Kurukulasuriya, senior technical adviser on climate change for the UNDP Environment and Energy Group, told America.gov.

“We don’t want these projects to become stand-alone islands of great initiatives that are removed from the rest of the assistance being provided to the country, not only through UNDP and WHO but also other agencies,” Kurukulasuriya said. “We’re also looking to coordinate better and partner with others, in this case certainly the U.S. government, to ensure that these countries receive targeted and coherent and aligned support.”

BIGGEST GLOBAL HEALTH THREAT

According to a 2009 report by the medical journal Lancet and the University College London Institute for Global Health, climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.

The most important long-term influences of climate change, UNDP says, will likely be changes in natural ecosystems and their impacts on disease carriers like mosquitoes, waterborne diseases like cholera, and other contaminants. Climate change’s effects on access to water, food and shelter, extreme weather and population growth will have great impacts on human health.

WHO estimates that by 2000, climate change that had occurred since the mid-1970s was responsible for a net increase of more than 150,000 deaths a year. By 2030, according to UNDP, the number of excess deaths due to climate change effects will double.

“The science of climate change has a range of uncertainty, so it’s often difficult to know what we’re supposed to adapt to, and when,” Kurukulasuriya said. “So we decided to focus on issues we understand are quite likely to be important.”

INCREASING VULNERABILITY

In each country the pilot project works through the ministry of health, with the support of WHO and UNDP country offices, Kurukulasuriya said.

The work targets water stress in Barbados; flooding from glaciers and water- and air-borne diseases in Bhutan; heat-related cardiovascular diseases in China; floods and drought in Fiji; water quality and quantity in Jordan; changes in malaria transmission and distribution in Kenya; and diseases related to heat and water stress in Uzbekistan.

“The kinds of things we expected the individual countries to be most worried about ― it was quite different when we got to the countries and talked to the people who were dealing with the problems,” Campbell-Lendrum said.

The project developers in New York and Geneva expected a small island state like Fiji to be worried about sea level rise or hurricanes, but the Fiji Ministry of Health’s main concern was water stress ― that with climate change there would be too much or too little. China could have chosen climate-related flooding or drought or infectious diseases, but the Ministry of Health decided to work on heat stress for people in large cities, which are growing and have aging populations and rising car use and pollution.

Climate change will worsen ongoing problems like water scarcity or disease outbreaks that countries are already dealing with, Campbell-Lendrum said, and the lesson the project developers learned is that existing problems are the adaptation issues countries most want to address.

Each country’s activities incorporate some element of early warning planning, he said. In Kenya, this includes early detection of the first cases of malaria to determine if an epidemic is coming. In China, it’s combining public health information for the elderly and ill with weather forecasts of coming high temperatures.