On Thursday, April 7, we celebrate World Health Day, an event proclaimed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and which this year, under the slogan “Our planet, our health“, aims to focus on the urgent measures that need to be adopted to preserve our health and that of the planet. The aim is to contribute to making the environments in which we live healthy spaces, rethinking, to this end, our relationship with nature.
In the current context, the health of the entire world population is being seriously threatened by the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Air pollution, water scarcity, soil degradation, extreme weather events greatly increase the spread of infectious diseases and other pathologies. According to the World Health Organization, the greatest danger facing humanity is the climate crisis and its resulting effects on health.
Climate change influences determinants of good health, such as the availability of clean air, drinking water, sufficient and well-maintained food, and safe housing. The third installment of the Sixth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that, in order to avoid catastrophic health impacts and prevent millions of deaths related to the climate crisis, the planet must limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. The WHO, for its part, adds that reducing greenhouse gas emissions by implementing sustainable policies in transport, food and energy use can translate into improvements in health, thus reducing the number of deaths and disease pathologies due to environmental factors.
In addition, according to estimates made by the WHO, there are more than 13 million deaths each year due to preventable environmental causes, and there are projections that, between 2030 and 2050, climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths each year due to malnutrition, diseases such as malaria or symptoms such as diarrhoea. An important risk factor is air pollution, which is directly related to cerebrovascular pathologies, lung cancer and chronic and acute lung diseases, such as asthma. The World Health Organization warns that 99% of the world’s population breathes air with quality levels below the minimum required standard. In addition, air pollution continues to be the leading environmental cause of premature death, with more than 4.2 million deaths per year, so, according to the Organization, it is necessary to reduce air pollution levels to improve the cardiovascular and respiratory health of the population, both in the long, medium and short term.
Environmental pollution includes the problem of noise pollution, especially noise derived from traffic and the circulation of vehicles in urban environments. The WHO highlights that cities are especially vulnerable, since more than 55% of the world’s population resides there, a percentage that will increase over time due to an increase in the population rate. In addition, the Organization warns that urban transport systems that do not take sustainability into account contribute negatively to reinforcing threats such as air and noise pollution, which would lead to higher levels of non-communicable diseases and injuries. In addition, cities consume more than two-thirds of the planet’s energy and are responsible for more than 60% of greenhouse gas emissions, which means that around 91% of their inhabitants breathe air that contains high levels of pollutants.
