Introduction
Climate change has a rapidly growing impact on public health and hence on both national and human security. The warming of the Earth’s atmosphere, driven by anthropogenic factors, transforms global and local climatic conditions and leads to more extreme weather patterns. Health security is affected by the resulting increase in the frequency of heat waves and other natural disasters, by worsening air pollution, and by indirect impacts on the prevalence of vector- and water-borne diseases, food security, and social stability, among other effects.
Climate change also impacts public health security in a deeper and more fundamental sense. Public health as a governmental activity originally developed as a mechanism of security aiming to manage overall processes at the level of the population, based on the natural regularities they display and on predictions and interventions that these patterns make possible. Climate change, as the continuous and relatively rapid transformation...
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Further Reading
Brklacich, M., Chazan, M., & Bohle, H. G. (2009). Human security vulnerability, and global environmental change. In R. A. Matthew, J. Barnett, B. McDonald, & K. L. O’Brien (Eds.), Global environmental change and human security (pp. 35–51). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Gilman, N., Randall, D., & Schwartz, P. (2011). Climate change and ‘security.’ In J. S. Dryzek, R. B. Norgaard, & D. Schlosberg (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of climate change and society. Retrieved from https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199566600.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199566600-e-17
Levy, B., & Patz, J. (Eds.). (2015). Climate change and public health. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
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Friedmann, V. (2020). Climate Change and Public Health. In: Romaniuk, S., Thapa, M., Marton, P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_627-1
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