Abstract
Anthropogenic climate change is adversely impacting people and contributing to suffering and increased costs from climate-related diseases and injuries. In responding to this urgent and growing public health crisis, mitigation strategies are in place to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) while adaptation strategies exist to reduce and/or alleviate the adverse effects of climate change by increasing systems’ resilience to future impacts. While these strategies have numerous positive benefits on climate change itself, they also often have other positive externalities or health co-benefits. This knowledge can be harnessed to promote and improve global public health, particularly for the most vulnerable populations. Previous conceptual models in mitigation and adaptation studies such as the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) considered health in the thinking, but health outcomes were not their primary intention. Additionally, existing guidance documents such as the World Health Organization (WHO) Guidance for Climate Resilient and Environmentally Sustainable Health Care Facilities is designed primarily for public health professionals or healthcare managers in hospital settings with a primary focus on resilience. However, a detailed cross sectoral and multidisciplinary conceptual framework, which links mitigation and adaptation strategies with health outcomes as a primary end point, has not yet been developed to guide research in this area. In this paper, we briefly summarize the burden of climate change on global public health, describe important mitigation and adaptation strategies, and present key health benefits by giving context specific examples from high, middle, and low-income settings. We then provide a conceptual framework to inform future global public health research and preparedness across sectors and disciplines and outline key stakeholders recommendations in promoting climate resilient systems and advancing health equity.
Highlights
We describe major climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies with examples from different world regions, including high, middle, and low-income settings, in order to illustrate the global variation in strategies
We draw upon this body of work to present a conceptual framework to guide future research on public health benefits resulting from climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies around the world
UPAF has many other benefits such as improving air quality by using up the carbon, provision of biomass, which is the main source of cooking energy at home, and offsetting the urban heat island (UHI) effect through increased green space within urban areas and their surroundings, all enabling cities to become more resilient to adverse impacts of climate change [155]
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil-. Mitigation strategies intend to reduce GHGE and enhance GHG capture and storage, thereby reducing GHG concentration in the atmosphere and preventing additional adverse impacts of climate change on the environment and public health. We describe major climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies with examples from different world regions, including high, middle, and low-income settings, in order to illustrate the global variation in strategies. We draw upon this body of work to present a conceptual framework to guide future research on public health benefits resulting from climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies around the world. We present major recommendations to stakeholders and give our concluding remarks
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