Health effects of climate change and mitigating effects of climate policies evidence from Bangladesh

There is growing evidence suggesting that climate change and extreme weather events have detrimental effects on human health, lives, and livelihoods. Extreme temperature, sea-level rise, salinity, floods, storms, and droughts are some of the most common climate change-induced events (Frumkin et al. 2008, Patz et al. 2000). Available literature suggests that some climate events have a direct impact on healthcare infrastructure and thus indirect consequences on individual health. For example, several empirical papers have found extreme temperatures to predict mortality (Curriero et al. 2002; Hajat et al. 2006; Goldberg et al. 2011; Son et al. 2016; Rodrigues, Santana, and Rocha 2019) and hospitalization (Bobb et al. 2014; Schwartz, Samet, and Patz 2004; Son, Bell, and Lee 2014). The 2020 Lancet Countdown report (Watts et al. 2020) concludes that the health impacts of climate change are worsening over time with further deteriorating climate, and countries and populations with heterogenous attributes experience those impacts disproportionately. Similarly, climate events may reduce food production and hamper food distribution to have the same detrimental effects on people’s health. A systematic review of the evidence of health effects of droughts by Stanke et al. (2013), for example, reveals that droughts as a consequence of climate change can lead to adverse indirect health outcomes such as malnutrition and infectious disease. A recent study identified, inter alia, that there can be long-term sustained effects of climate extremes on the affected children including lower health status during adulthood (Eskander and Barbier 2022.

source :

https://www.adb.org/publications/health-effects-climate-change-bangladesh