Seventy-five percent of registered voters want federal agencies to maintain or increase their efforts to protect people from the health harms of global warming. That figure is from a recently released national survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.
Increasingly, Americans are experiencing or reading about the threats that climate change poses to human health, so the survey results probably should not surprise us.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) concluded that climate risks are appearing faster and will become more severe sooner than previously expected, and it will be harder to adapt with increased global heating. IPCC calculated that 3.6 billion of the planet’s eight billion people already live in areas highly susceptible to climate change.
“With the next five years forecast to be more than 1.5C warmer than preindustrial levels on average, this will put more people than ever at risk of severe heat waves, bringing more deaths and severe health impacts unless people can be better protected from the effects of heat,” said Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the UK Met Office and a professor at the University of Exeter. He told AP’s Seth Borenstein, “Also we can expect more severe wildfires as the hotter atmosphere dries out the landscape,”
Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone. Climate change also takes a toll in ways that might not occur to us. As Maggie Astor reported in The New York Times, one recent study found that firefighters who fought the Los Angeles blazes in January had elevated lead and mercury in their blood. Scientists have also discovered that some wildfire smoke contains substances associated with chronic conditions like heart disease.
Despite these grim realities, the Trump administration has indicated that it will stop funding research on the health effects of climate change. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said in an internal document obtained by The New York Times that it was the agency’s new policy “not to prioritize” research related to climate change.
The Times’ Lisa Friedman wrote: “How does extreme heat affect Alzheimer’s patients? Do air purifiers help people suffering from chronic lung disease? What are the most cost-effective ways to protect communities from wildfire smoke and extreme heat?”
She told readers that when it canceled $450 million in NIH grants and contracts to Harvard University, the Trump administration ended those research projects, as well as dozens of others focused on the connection between climate change, the environment and public health.
The field of climate and environmental health research has grown significantly over the past three decades as the consequences of rising global temperatures have become clear.
Perry Hystad, a professor in the College of Health at Oregon State University, had expected to receive a five-year NIH grant to study who is most susceptible to extreme-weather exposure. He planned to follow more than 200,000 people in 27 countries, a far larger subject base than most studies. But he no longer believes he will receive the grant.
Federal funding is vital. “There’s nothing that comes close,” said Dr. Shohreh Farzan, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. “This could be a really devastating loss to scientists who have worked for years with a goal of keeping people healthy.”
Kristie L. Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington who studies the health risks of climate change, said the field was already poorly funded. The NIH finally began to put an emphasis on funding climate change research during the Biden administration, she said, and eliminating more of it could have serious consequences for public health. “Americans are dying from climate change,” Dr. Ebi said.