Climate change threat to children

NEXT Monday is World Health Day which has been celebrated each year since 1950.

It marks the founding of the World Health Organisation and is an opportunity to draw attention to a subject of major importance to global health.

This year the focus is on the effects that climate change is likely to have on health.

Plan Ireland works with children in the developing world and they are the most vulnerable of all to the effects of climate change as they constitute a large proportion of the population in areas of the world that are likely to be worst affected, especially Africa and Asia.

The effects of climate change on child health are already being felt.

For example, the range of the malarial mosquito is expanding all the time due to rising temperatures, and today 50% of the world’s population is exposed to malaria compared to 40% a decade ago.

Of course, children are particularly vulnerable with 65% of the deaths from malaria being of children under the age of five.

If the predictions of increased flooding and temperature rises are correct, and all the signs seem to indicate that they are, we can also expect significant increases in child mortality due to increased prevalence of water-borne and respiratory diseases.

Flooding will have dire effects on sanitation systems in developing countries causing diarrhoea and worm infections which already kill millions of children each year.

Climate change will also have a devastating effect on crop production which could result in malnutrition on a scale that the world has seldom seen.

So, perhaps World Health Day can be seen as not so much a celebration but more a wake-up call.

We must take seriously the warnings that are being issued by scientists and climatologists on a daily basis.

More importantly, we must plan our responses and put in place relevant programmes to assist communities that will otherwise be devastated.

David Dalton

Plan Ireland

126 Lr Baggot Street

Dublin 2