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Within the Health, Climate, and Security Nexus, Prevention is Better than a Cure
During the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, healthcare workers were contracting Ebola at an alarming rate. The World Health Organization (WHO) found that those fighting Ebola at the frontlines–in clinics and hospitals–were up to 32 times more likely to contract the disease than the rest of the population. Among the principal reasons why was the lack of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services in healthcare facilities, which rendered healthcare workers unable to wash their hands and disinfect surfaces. At the time, UNICEF reported that the demand for running water in Sierra Leonean healthcare facilities outstripped supply, as safely treating patients with Ebola requires 140 liters per day per patient. The most recent data from 2021 show that a staggering 80% of healthcare facilities in the West African country are without basic water services and less than 1% of its population has piped water at home. Globally, a quarter of all healthcare facilities are without basic water services and in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), which includes Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo–the latest country to fight an Ebola outbreak–this number grows to half of all healthcare facilities. Without access to WASH services in healthcare settings and in communities at-large, global health security cannot be achieved.
(more…)Climate Change and Health Featuring CSR’s Andrea Rezzonico
On October 18, Andrea Rezzonico, Deputy to the CEO and Deputy Director of the Converging Risks Lab, was featured on the Jacobs Sparks Podcast alongside Dr. Nino Kharaishvili, Global Solutions Director of Health Systems Governance at Jacobs.
In the interview, Andrea and Dr. Kharaishvili discusses the intersection of climate change and global health issues, including: the importance of One Health; the intersections of climate and health impacts such as infectious diseases and pathogen spread; how these risks converge with other security challenges — culminating in complex emergencies; the need for government and private sector collaboration to address these convergences, and more.
This conversation is part of CSR’s broader effort to address the climate, health, and security nexus. CSR supports numerous initiatives aimed at bolstering our understanding around climate change, ecological disruption, biological hazards and threats, and security intersections as well as strengthening related policy and response mechanisms. Incorporating a converging risks lens is critical to adequately prepare for future crises – especially in light of the current global health emergency.
Tune into the episode here.
The Geopolitics of COVID-19 and Climate Change
By The Stockholm Environment Institute and Mistra Geopolitics hosted a webinar on the Geopolitics of COVID-19 and Climate Change on 3 April. It covered how the ongoing crisis might impact climate ambition in the near term, whether or not global cooperation around the Covid response might increase resilience and counteract trends toward nationalism and isolationism, and how best to integrate climate and sustainability objectives into pandemic recovery efforts. (more…)
Health-Related Costs of Climate Change Will Add Billions to Damage Assessments
An aerial view of Offutt Air Force Base affected by major flood waters March 17, 2019. An increase in water levels caused by record-setting snowfall over the winter, and a large drop in air pressure, caused widespread flooding across the state of Nebraska. (U.S. Air Force photo by TSgt. Rachelle Blake)
The recent physical damage and destruction of facilities and infrastructure in the United States, both on and off military installations (e.g., Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida from Hurricane Michael in 2018 and Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska due to flooding from the Missouri River in 2019), will cost billions of dollars to repair or replace. Both Hurricane Michael and the Missouri River flooding were likely influenced by climate change. Besides the physical effects of these and other events, there are also health-related costs from climate change that will affect the populations that live and work on installations, their surrounding communities, and the larger surrounding region. These health care costs will be in the billions of dollars, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, it seems even more critical than ever to alleviate other strains on health security in the United States,
To estimate what these climate-related health costs may be, Limaye et al (2019) used data from 10 cases across 11 states that occurred in 2012. The research improves on 2011 research by Knowlton et al. Understanding these costs are important because health costs are regularly absent from the damage assessments prepared for facilities and infrastructure, whether this infrastructure is military or civilian; identifying these costs raises their importance for estimating future health costs and their implications to the holistic damage estimates that climate change is forecasted to cause; and better estimating these costs prepares communities to assess whether the kinds of adaptation efforts they undertake, including those related to health, will return the benefits they anticipate. (more…)