Climate change and Australia's health

03/05/2007
From ABC News (Aust)

Most of the dire warnings about climate change have focused on costs from damage to ecosystems, loss of habitat, and damage to property from freak weather patterns; fires, storms, floods and so on. There hasn’t been much attention given to the effect on the long-term health of populations.

But anything that radically affects housing, water and food supply, will affect our wellbeing. And climate change has the ability to affect all these in spades.

The latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report looked at the health implications of global warming and the news was grim. There'll be hundreds of thousands of deaths from crop failures and food shortages, floods, cyclones, droughts leading to mass population displacements, and water contamination leading to diarrhoeal diseases like cholera and dysentery.

...

Read the article.