sharon sanders
Editor-in-Chief & President
Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological & Economic Dimensions
Key Points:
Key Points:
1. Warming favors the spread of disease.
2. Extreme weather events create conditions conducive to disease outbreaks.
3. Climate change and infectious diseases threaten wildlife, livestock, agriculture, forests and marine life, which provide us with essential resources and constitute our life-support systems.
4. Climate instability and the spread of diseases are not good for business.
5. The impacts of climate change could increase incrementally over decades.
6. Some impacts of warming and greater weather volatility could occur suddenly and become widespread.
7. Coastal human communities, coral reefs and forests are particularly vulnerable to warming and disease, especially as the return time between
extremes shortens.
8. A more positive scenario is that climate reaches a new equilibrium, allowing a measure of adaptation and the opportunity to rapidly reduce the global environmental influence of human activities, namely fossil fuel combustion and deforestation.
9. A well-funded, well-insured program to develop and distribute a diverse suite of means to generate energy cleanly, efficiently and safely offers enormous business opportunities and may present the most secure means of restabilizing the climate.
10. Solutions to the emerging energy crisis must be throroughly scrutinized as to their life cycle impacts on health and safety, environmental integrity, global security and the international economy.
http://chge.med.harvard.edu/programs/ccf/documents/ccf_report_oct_06.pdf
2. Extreme weather events create conditions conducive to disease outbreaks.
3. Climate change and infectious diseases threaten wildlife, livestock, agriculture, forests and marine life, which provide us with essential resources and constitute our life-support systems.
4. Climate instability and the spread of diseases are not good for business.
5. The impacts of climate change could increase incrementally over decades.
6. Some impacts of warming and greater weather volatility could occur suddenly and become widespread.
7. Coastal human communities, coral reefs and forests are particularly vulnerable to warming and disease, especially as the return time between
extremes shortens.
8. A more positive scenario is that climate reaches a new equilibrium, allowing a measure of adaptation and the opportunity to rapidly reduce the global environmental influence of human activities, namely fossil fuel combustion and deforestation.
9. A well-funded, well-insured program to develop and distribute a diverse suite of means to generate energy cleanly, efficiently and safely offers enormous business opportunities and may present the most secure means of restabilizing the climate.
10. Solutions to the emerging energy crisis must be throroughly scrutinized as to their life cycle impacts on health and safety, environmental integrity, global security and the international economy.
http://chge.med.harvard.edu/programs/ccf/documents/ccf_report_oct_06.pdf