250,000 people will die each year as a result of climate change
weather.com, 23rd February 23 2018, By Pam Wright
- Comments from researchers at a recent conference on health and climate change aligned with World Health Organization’s predictions.
- According to WHO, 250,000 people will die each year as a result of climate change.
Death rates as a result of climate change could top a quarter of a million a year by 2050, according to experts and the World Health Organization.
Experts say deaths related to human-caused climate change will soar to 250,000 a year by 2050. (DKAR Images via Getty Images)
Saskia Heijnen of Wellcome Trust, a London-based biomedical research charity, told attendees of the Global Health conference at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in Scotland that an estimated 250,000 deaths will be directly attributed to climate change by 2050.
Heijnen also noted that the planet would have to produce 60 percent more food by 2050 to meet the needs of the world’s population and that two-thirds of the world’s population would live in cities by 2050.
Heijnen heads Our Planet, Our Health, a program under the Wellcome Trust tasked with finding ways to “protect the health of the global population and planet.”
Medical professionals convened for the conference to discuss how health and the environment are affected by climate change, increased urbanization and food systems.
Heijnen’s comments align with findings released in July by WHO.
At a Climate and Health conference in Atlanta last week, which replaced a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention climate meeting canceled in January under the Trump administration, experts noted that deaths linked to climate change are expected to soar to 250,000 between 2030 and 2050 because of heat stress related to global warming, malnutrition and the spread of infectious diseases like malaria.
“The extreme weather events calculated by the insurance industry have obviously been increasing,” former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said in the keynote speech at the meeting. “As I’ve said on other occasions, every night on the television news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.”
According to WHO, the direct damage costs to health from human-caused climate change is estimated to be between $2 and $4 billion per year by 2030. This excludes the costs in health-determining sectors such as agriculture and water and sanitation, WHO notes.