The world should brace for potentially devastating impacts on human health due to climate change, top policy makers and officials from around the globe meeting in Paris said on Thursday. Some of these consequences may be avoided if humanity radically curbs its use of fossil fuels in coming decades, but many are already being felt, they said at the opening of a two-day conference run by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and hosted by France.
"Health and climate are inextricably linked because human health depends directly on the health of the planet," French environment and energy minister Segolene Royal told participants. Royal, also the rotating president of UN-led talks on how best to cope with global warming, said health impacts must play a more central role in future negotiations.
"From now on, I will do my best to ensure that health is integrated into all future climate conferences," starting with a special forum at the next high-level gathering of the 196-nation UN climate meeting in Marrakesh in November, she told AFP.
The Paris Agreement, inked in December last year, calls for holding global warming to well under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit), and helping poor nations cope with its impacts.
A crescendo of scientific studies paints an alarming picture of the human suffering in store due to disrupted weather patterns, rising seas, droughts and climate-enhanced superstorms.
Tropical disease vectors - for malaria, dengue and zika, to name a few - are expanding as the insects that carry them spread following warming climes.
Extreme heat waves set to occur every decade rather than once a century will claims more lives, especially the ill and the elderly.
The WHO estimated in 2005 that killer hot spells claim 150,000 lives annually. More than 45,000 died in Europe alone due to a heatwave in the summer of 2003.