PD 11 - Climate Change and Health

Our increasing understanding of climate change is transforming how we view the boundaries and determinants of human health. While our personal health may seem to relate mostly to prudent behavior, heredity, occupation, local environmental exposures, and health-care access, sustained population health requires the life-supporting "services" of natural systems. Populations of all animal species depend on supplies of food and water, low exposure to major infectious diseases, and a stable climate. Unprecedented changes are occurring in natural systems that threaten to undermine progress in human health. Urgent action is needed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions leading to rapid climate change and to address other environmental trends that pose increasing risks to human health.