Temperature-related mortality mostly affects older people and is attributable to a combination of factors. We focussed on a key non-temperature factor - rising longevity - and aimed to quantify its reciprocal relation with temperature-related mortality risk in Spain over 1980-2018. We obtained average annual temperature-attributable deaths among people aged 65y+, by sex and age group, for different temperature ranges (extreme cold, moderate cold, moderate heat, and extreme heat), from a previous study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Extensive evidence links both cold and hot temperatures to an increased incidence of occupational injuries. Contextual modifiers of the temperature-injury association have been scarcely researched. The present study addresses temporal and spatial variations to identify factors associated with (mal)adaptation to heat and cold among Spanish workers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: More frequent and intense exposure to extreme heat conditions poses a serious threat to public health. However, evidence on the association between heat and specific diagnoses of morbidity is still limited. We aimed to comprehensively assess the short-term association between cause-specific hospital admissions and high temperature, including the added effect of temperature variability and heat waves and the effect modification by humidity and air pollution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: We assessed the association of temperature and temperature variability with cause-specific emergency hospitalizations and mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in Spain, as well as the effect modification of this association by individual and contextual factors.
Methods And Results: We collected data on health (hospital admissions and mortality), weather (temperature and relative humidity), and relevant contextual indicators for 48 Spanish provinces during 2004-2019. The statistical analysis was separately performed for the summer (June-September) and winter (December-March) seasons.
Climate change and population ageing are converging challenges that are expected to significantly worsen the health impacts of high temperatures. We aimed to remeasure the implications of ageing for heat-related mortality by comparing time trends based on chronological age (number of years already lived) with those derived from the application of state-of-the-art demographic methodology which better captures the dynamics of evolving longevity: prospective age (number of years still to be lived). We conducted a nationwide time-series analysis of 13 regions in Spain over 1980-2018 using all-cause mortality microdata for people aged 65+ and annual life tables from the Spanish National Institute of Statistics, and daily mean temperatures from E-OBS.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A number of studies have reported reductions in mortality risk due to heat and cold over time. However, questions remain about the drivers of these adaptation processes to ambient temperatures. We aimed to analyse the demographic and socioeconomic drivers of the downward trends in vulnerability to heat- and cold-related mortality observed in Spain during recent decades (1980-2018).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Heat is a significant cause of mortality, but impact patterns are heterogenous. Previous studies assessing such heterogeneity focused exclusively on risk rather than heat-attributable mortality burdens and assume predictors are independent.
Objectives: We assessed how four interrelated regional-level sociodemographic predictors-education, life expectancy, the ratio of older to younger people (aging index), and relative income-influence heterogeneity in heat-attributable mortality burdens in Europe and then derived insights into adaptation strategies.
Background: Health impact assessment (HIA) is a widely used process that aims to identify the health impacts, positive or negative, of a policy or intervention that is not necessarily placed in the health sector. Most HIAs are done prospectively and aim to forecast expected health impacts under assumed policy implementation. HIAs may quantitatively and/ or qualitatively assess health impacts, with this study focusing on the former.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Human activities have changed the environment so profoundly over the past two centuries that human-induced climate change is now posing serious health-related threats to current and future generations. Rapid action from all scientific fields, including behavioral medicine, is needed to contribute to both mitigation of, and adaption to, climate change.
Purpose: This article aims to identify potential bi-directional associations between climate change impacts and health-related behaviors, as well as a set of key actions for the behavioral medicine community.
Environmental improvement is a priority for urban sustainability and health and achieving it requires transformative change in cities. An approach to achieving such change is to bring together researchers, decision-makers, and public groups in the creation of research and use of scientific evidence. This article describes the development of a programme theory for Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health (CUSSH), a four-year Wellcome-funded research collaboration which aims to improve capacity to guide transformational health and environmental changes in cities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA growing number of cities, including Greater London, have set ambitious targets, including detailed policies and implementation plans, to reach global goals on sustainability, health, and climate change. Here we present a tool for a rapid assessment of the magnitude of impact of specific policy initiatives to reach these targets. The decision-support tool simultaneously quantifies the environmental and health impacts of specified selected policies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUndernutrition is a major contributor to the global-burden of disease, and global-level health impact models suggest that climate change-mediated reductions in food quantity and quality will negatively affect it. These models, however, capture just some of the processes that will shape future nutrition. We adopt an alternative standpoint, developing an agent-based model in which producer-consumer smallholders practice different 'styles of farming' in the global food system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In 2016, 23% of children (155 million) aged [Formula: see text] were stunted. Global-level modeling has consistently found climate change impacts on food production are likely to impair progress on reducing undernutrition.
Objectives: We adopt a new perspective, assessing how climate change may affect child stunting via its impacts on two interacting socioeconomic drivers: incomes of the poorest 20% of populations (due to climate impacts on crop production, health, labor productivity, and disasters) and food prices.
Malaria is an important disease that has a global distribution and significant health burden. The spatial limits of its distribution and seasonal activity are sensitive to climate factors, as well as the local capacity to control the disease. Malaria is also one of the few health outcomes that has been modeled by more than one research group and can therefore facilitate the first model intercomparison for health impacts under a future with climate change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Global climate change is anticipated to reduce future cereal yields and threaten food security, thus potentially increasing the risk of undernutrition. The causation of undernutrition is complex, and there is a need to develop models that better quantify the potential impacts of climate change on population health.
Objectives: We developed a model for estimating future undernutrition that accounts for food and nonfood (socioeconomic) causes and can be linked to available regional scenario data.
Arch Environ Occup Health
January 2010
Global climate change will increase outdoor and indoor heat loads, and may impair health and productivity for millions of working people. This study applies physiological evidence about effects of heat, climate guidelines for safe work environments, climate modeling, and global distributions of working populations to estimate the impact of 2 climate scenarios on future labor productivity. In most regions, climate change will decrease labor productivity, under the simple assumption of no specific adaptation.
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