Countdown to Climate Change Outcomes

"Children are particularly vulnerable to the health risks of a changing climate. Their bodies and immune systems are still developing, leaving them more susceptible to disease and environmental pollutants."
"[Health damage in early childhood is] persistent and pervasive [carrying lifelong consequences]."
"Without immediate action from all countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, gains in well-being and life expectancy will be compromised, and climate change will come to define the health of an entire generation."
Nick Watts, co-leader, The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change study

A dried creek near Yangon, Myanmar. Photograph: Khin Maung Win/AP

Yes, Earth's climate is in the throes of change where an increased number of extreme weather events are occurring all over the world, their atmospheric and climatic disruptions increasing the problem of air pollution. And children will face multiple and lifelong deleterious health impacts as a result, as they grow up in a food-riskier climate, facing infectious diseases, catastrophic floods and other manifestations of the world's changing climate, according to a major global study.

Published in The Lancet medical journal, the study lays out the anticipated impacts of a changing world, their near-inevitability, and what the future is beginning to increasingly resemble. Warning that the impact of unmitigated climate change will have a profound effect on coming generations, burdening them with disease and illness their lives through. Global and national policies limiting polluting and toxic emissions, according to the research team, could conceivably bring a vastly different outcome.

A collaboration by 120 experts from 35 institutions, along with the World Health Organization, the World Bank, University College London and Tsinghua University in China, the study relied upon the professional expertise of a wide range of scientists. Who collectively warned through the study results that a "business as usual" approach, forestalling action to remediate the situation would result in children becoming vulnerable to rising food prices and malnutrition.

Crop failure in New South Wales, Australia, this October. Photograph: David Gray/Getty

Extreme weather events, allowed to continue by the inaction of humanity on this front, would see the likeliest victims being children living where warmer waters and worsening climates are expected to accelerate the spread of dengue fever, cholera and other infectious diseases. Air pollution has been singled out as the most immediate, long-lasting of the health threats resulting from climate change.

The introduction of cleaner fuels and vehicles and government policies meant to encourage safe and active transport such as walking and cycling would, in and of itself, create a healthier, more active population. In 2015, according to the World Health Organization, seven million deaths were attributable to the effects of household and ambient air pollution, the vast majority occurring in low and middle-income countries.

"If we want to protect our children, we need to make sure the air they breathe isn't toxic", warned Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson, global health specialist at University of Sussex, Britain, who was involved in the Lancet study.