Introduction: Climate Risks in the Health Sector

Abstract

This chapter details the structure of the book, and introduces relevant terminology and concepts used in it. The first section describes the scope of the book while the second section presents the conceptual framing in terms of risks to the health sector and adaptation for managing the risks from climate change. It presents the current evidence on climate change and projected risks for the health sector, the association between different climate drivers and prevalence of selected diseases, and concerns of exposure and vulnerability across regions of the world.

Appendix 1: Definition of Some Key Terms

• Adaptation: The process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects. In human systems, adaptation seeks to moderate or avoid harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. In some natural systems, human intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate and its effects.

• Incremental Adaptation: Adaptation actions where the central aim is to maintain the essence and integrity of a system or process at a given scale.

• Transformational Adaptation: Adaptation that changes the fundamental attributes of a system in response to climate and its effects.

• Adaptation Assessment: The practice of identifying options to adapt to climate change and evaluating them in terms of criteria such as availability, benefits, costs, effectiveness, efficiency, and feasibility.

• Adaptation Deficit: The gap between the current state of a system and a state that minimizes adverse impacts from existing climate conditions and variability.

• Vulnerability: The propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected. Vulnerability encompasses a variety of concepts and elements including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt.

• Outcome vulnerability (End-point vulnerability): Vulnerability as the end point of a sequence of analyses beginning with projections of future emission trends, moving on to the development of climate scenarios, and concluding with biophysical impact studies and the identification of adaptive options. Any residual consequences that remain after adaptation has taken place define the levels of vulnerability.

• Contextual vulnerability (Starting-point vulnerability): A present inability to cope with external pressures or changes, such as changing climate conditions. Contextual vulnerability is a characteristic of social and ecological systems generated by multiple factors and processes.

• Risk: The potential for consequences where something of value is at stake and where the outcome is uncertain, recognizing the diversity of values. Risk is often represented as probability of occurrence of hazardous events or trends multiplied by the impacts if these events or trends occur. Risk results from the interaction of vulnerability, exposure, and hazard. In this report, the term risk is used primarily to refer to the risks of climate-change impacts.

• Mitigation (of climate change): A human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.

• Mitigation (of disaster risk and disaster): The lessening of the potential adverse impacts of physical hazards (including those that are human-induced) through actions that reduce hazard, exposure, and vulnerability.

• Climate Change: Climate change refers to a change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer. Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings such as modulations of the solar cycles, volcanic eruptions, and persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use. Note that the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in its Article 1, defines climate change as: “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.” The UNFCCC thus makes a distinction between climate change attributable to human activities altering the atmospheric composition, and climate variability attributable to natural causes.

• Climate altering pollutant: Gases and particles released from human activities that affect the climate either directly, through mechanisms such as radiative forcing from changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, or indirectly, by, for example, affecting cloud formation or the lifetime of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. CAPs include both those pollutants that have a warming effect on the atmosphere, such as CO₂, and those with cooling effects, such as sulfates.

Source IPCC AR5 WG II Glossary:

https://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WGIIAR5-AnnexII_FINAL.pdf.