Fighting Global Warming Could Also Benefit Human Health
Several newly released studies suggest that cutting global warming pollution would not only make the planet healthier, it would also benefit the health of the people of the world.
The studies, published Wednesday in the Lancet British medical journal, said slashing carbon dioxide emissions could save millions of lives, mostly by reducing preventable deaths from heart and lung diseases.
The conclusions were based on computer models that looked at pollution-caused illnesses in certain cities and researchers conceded that they are based on the world making dramatic changes in daily life that may at first seem too hard and costly to do.
Medical experts said cutting carbon dioxide emissions would also reduce other types of air pollution, especially tiny particles that lodge in the lungs and cause direct health damage. Researchers said to improving heart health could come from encouraging more exercise and less meat consumption.
Christopher Portier, associate director of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said reducing greenhouse gases not only helps save the planet in the long term, but it’s going to improve our health virtually immediately.
"It’s not 50 years from now, it is now," Portier said.
The new research not only explored the health ills caused by future global warming, it also looked at the immediate benefits of doing something about the problem.
Portier said for places like the United States, those advantages of reduced heart and lung diseases are bigger than the specific future health damage from worsening warming.
Many of the benefits detailed in the studies would only come from dramatic – and what could be considered unlikely – changes in everyday life, such as more bicycling and walking and reduced meat consumption.
However, others are more concrete and achievable, such as eliminating cook stoves that burn dung, charcoal, wood and other polluting fuels in India and the rest of the developing world.
Such proposals were examined by researchers aimed at cutting global greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, by 50 percent by 2050.
Lead author Dr. Paul Wilkinson, an environmental epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the studies list ways people could attack major health problems at the same time as dealing with climate change.
Wilkinson said the individual studies came up with numbers of premature deaths prevented or extra years of life added for certain locales, but they could not be added up to one overall number of lives saved worldwide.
"Still, the numbers would be substantial, would certainly be in the millions," he added.
One study found that switching to low-polluting cars in London and Delhi, India, would save 160 lost years of life in London and nearly 1,700 in Delhi for every million residents.
However, if people also drove less and walked or biked more, those extra saved years would soar to more than 7,300 years in London and 12,500 years in Delhi because of less heart disease, the report said.
Meanwhile, reducing – though not eliminating – meat consumption would decrease heart disease roughly 15 percent in England and in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Experts say meat consumption is a global warming issue because large livestock farms emit large amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane.
But Wilkinson said sometimes climate change efforts could add to health problems, such as certain home energy efficiency improvements that might seal houses so much that they add to deaths from radon and secondhand smoke exposure.
But he added that those are offset by other health benefits.
Outside scientists praised the studies and said the research was sound.
Dr. Paul Epstein of the Harvard School of Medicine’s Center for Health and the Global Environment said the science behind the research was really excellent.
“The modeling is quite good,” he said. “It really takes the whole field a step farther.”
But getting people to eat less meat and to exercise more would be tough to achieve, according to Portier and Wilkinson.
“We really have to change our lifestyles. I can’t help but hope that we can,” said Portier.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Margaret Chan said in a commentary on the studies that policymakers have been slow to recognize that the real bottom line of climate change is its risk to human health and quality of life.
"Malnutrition, and its devastating effects on child health, will increase. Worsening floods, droughts and storms will cause more deaths and injuries. Heatwaves will cause more deaths, largely among people who are elderly,” Chan said.
"Finally, climate change could alter the geographical distribution of disease vectors, including the insects that spread malaria and dengue."
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