When Climate Turns Nasty, What Are Recent and Future Implications? Ecological and Human Health Review of Climate Change Impacts

Abstract

The impacts of climate change on biodiversity in the last three decades have increasingly assumed from significant to threatening proportions and this causes major global concerns. This study aims at examining the recent and future impacts of global climate change on both ecological resources and human well-being. This review study is based on the general concept of ecological resilience: that coping with climate change stresses and disturbances depends on social resilience, political and environmental strategies accessible in a community. The study assessed over 300 peer-reviewed publications, both articles and books, which linked climate change impacts on ecosystems to social/health resilience of people in the specific regions. Publications on that were focused on general impacts of climate change on global ecology, ecosystem distribution shifts and phenology change; the ecological and social/health resilience, in the tropic and polar regions, were reviewed. The major finding of this study is that there is considerable variation in magnitudes and patterns of responses to climate change in different regions, even with an overall review of scientific studies on the global ecosystem and human health. Despite this, what is obvious is that change in the ecosystem in Polar Regions will continue to have significant impacts on the global environment, flora, fauna and ultimately human well-being. There are many uncertainties, though, on the possible effects of climate change ecosystem and soils and their severe biological, social, cultural and economic consequences. Notwithstanding these uncertainties, the impacts of climate change on both ecosystem and human socio-cultural activities are very likely to become even more widespread in the near future.