Climate change has major health implications for developing countries but the links are often not well understood. This report describes the current and predicted climate impacts on human health in southern Africa. It presents a view of existing health vulnerabilities to climate change, identifies risks, assesses possible future socioeconomic conditions in relation to future health risks and identifies priorities for action. Climate change affects health in southern Africa principally through the quality and adequacy of water supply, food insecurity, infections organisms and vectors and extreme weather events, largely in that descending order of impact and significance.
The prevalence of HIV/Aids increases the vulnerabilities of individuals and communities. Low levels of progress against the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including poor infrastructure, leaves health systems in southern Africa highly vulnerable and unprepared for the challenges of climate change. Nevertheless, southern African Development Community (SADC) ministers of health and environment are recognising the threats and have adopted a leadership position committing to addressing climate change,
Anthropogenic climate change and anticipated adverse effects on human health as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are taken as givens.
A conceptual model for thinking about the spectrum of climate-related health risks ranging from distal and infrastructural to proximal and behavioural and their relation to the burden of disease pattern typical of sub-Saharan Africa is provided. The model provides a tool for identifying modifiable risk factors with a view to future research, specifically into the performance of interventions to reduce the impact of climate change.
Through this study, several products have been developed including time series graphs of outbreak and epidemic occurrence by country, maps of the ecologies of the PHEIC diseases and epidemics, the distribution of these diseases by district. Overall, over 1730 outbreaks/epidemics have been reported int he WHO African region in the period 1970 to 2016. Because the outbreak/epidemic thresholds of the different diseases vary and the actual case data is incomplete, it is difficult to compare which diseases are most prevalent or pervasive. However, in terms of frequency of events, cholera, the arboviruses,measles and meningitis rank the highest.
Of the nearly 5250 administrative 2 units analysed in this study, almost each one has reported some form of a disease outbreak in the period 1970-2016, with cholera being the most geographically widespread. The resulting databases are spatially defined and should serve as the basis of subnational inventory of disease outbreaks and epidemics in the region.