Training on the impact of climate change on public health: reflections and lessons learnt

• Autor(a) principal: Viegas, Susana
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Santos, João Almeida, Kazmierczak, Aleksandra, Assunção, Ricardo, Viegas, Carla, Martins, Carla
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/16654
• topic: Public health; Climate change; Training programs; Knowledge translation

Climate change is a major concern for public health and is considered the most important environmental threat of the 21st century. Currently, countries are still dealing with the health, social, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic which have potential implications for global development pathways and how the risks from climate change are managed. Simultaneously, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 poses additional challenges, such as an energy crisis or the limited availability of some commodities, affecting not only the European countries but also the entire world. Unfortunately, this context brings more challenges to put in place actions intending to mitigate and adapt to climate change, worsening the impacts on human health and well-being and exacerbating the vulnerability of the world’s populations. Indeed, climate change is responsible for the onset or worsening of several risk factors for human health and consequently increasing the incidence and severity of several health outcomes, e.g., heat-related illness and death, exacerbations of asthma and other respiratory diseases, mental health effects, modification of the pattern of vector-borne and foodborne diseases, undernutrition. In Europe, between 1980 and 2020, in the 32 EEA member countries (EEA-32) and based on data from two separate sources (NatCatSERVICE and CATDAT), fatalities associated with climate change amounted to between 85,000 and 145,000.