Climate change and health
Fact sheet n°266:
This fact sheet includes sections on: (i) climate change general facts; (ii) the impact of climate change on health; (iii) extreme heat; (iv) natural disasters and variable rainfall patterns, including sea level rise, extreme weather events, drought, floods, and freshwater supplies contamination; (v) patterns of infection; (vi) measuring health effects; (vii) sectors of the population at risk; and (viii) the WHO response.
It also recalls that the World Health Assembly endorsed a new WHO workplan on climate change and health in 2009, which includes: advocacy (raising awareness that climate change is a fundamental threat to human health); partnerships (coordinating with other UN agencies and ensuring that health is properly represented in the climate change agenda); science and evidence (coordinating reviews of scientific evidence on the links between climate change and health, and developing a global research agenda); and health system strengthening (assisting countries to assess their health vulnerabilities and build capacity to reduce health vulnerability to climate change).