Compounded with an increased capacity of the air to hold water, warming accelerates soil water evaporation, leading to (2) drought in places that are commonly dry excess drought can lead to (3) heatwaves when heat transfer from water evaporation ceases. GHGs mediate the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing infrared radiation thus, (1) their excess in the atmosphere causes warming.
We considered the following ten climate hazards. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by applying a systematic approach to screen the literature for the set of interactions in which climatic hazards have been linked to human pathogenic diseases.
#Change syn full#
This failure to integrate available information prevents the quantification of the full threat to humanity posed by climate change as it relates to pathogenic diseases. Yet, with few exceptions 2, 8, past studies about the impact of climatic hazards on human pathogenic diseases have commonly focused on specific groups of pathogens (for example, bacteria 9, viruses 10), hazards (for example, warming 11, precipitation 12, floods 13) or transmission types (for example, vector- 14, 15, food- 16, waterborne 16, 17). The combination of numerous climatic hazards by the numerous pathogens reveals the potentially large number of interactions in which climatic hazards could aggravate human pathogenic diseases with the set of ‘viable’ interactions, or interactions for which empirical data exists, approximating the full extent of human vulnerability to climate change as it relates to pathogenic diseases. On the other hand, there is a broad taxonomic diversity of human pathogenic diseases (for example, bacteria, viruses, animals, plants, fungi, protozoa and so on), and transmission types (for example, vector-borne, airborne, direct contact and so on glossary in Text Box 1) that can be affected by those hazards. On one hand, it is increasingly recognized that the emission of GHGs has consequences on a multitude of climatic hazards of the Earth’s system (for example, warming, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, extreme precipitation, floods, sea level rise and so on Fig. While the conclusion that climate change can affect pathogenic diseases is relatively well accepted 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, the extent of human vulnerability to pathogenic diseases affected by climate change is not yet fully quantified. The societal disruption caused by pathogenic diseases, as clearly revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, provides worrisome glimpses into the potential consequences of looming health crises driven by climate change 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The ongoing emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is intensifying numerous climatic hazards of the Earth’s climate system, which in turn can exacerbate human pathogenic diseases 1.
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