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Forest, Human Health & The Impacts of Climate Change

Climate change does impact on human health, people living in forests deal with much more immediate problems, like children dying of dysentery and malaria and other diseases. Photo by Trish Shanley

The World Health Organization (WHO) dedicated the focus of this year's World Health Day, on April 14, to “Protecting Health from the adverse effects of Climate Change”.

Though one may not readily see a connection between climate change and health, the two are inextricably linked. Studies from around the world, including from CIFOR’s Carol Colfer, demonstrate that climate and weather have a powerful impact on human life and health, especially the health of vulnerable, forest-dependent people.

According to CIFOR scientist Patricia Shanley, who has spent over 5 years studying the complex relationship between forests and health, “at present, people living in forests deal with much more immediate problems than climate change, like children dying of dysentery and malaria and other diseases caused by the indirect effects of forest degradation. Add to this the fact that many of their medicinal plants and other Non Timber Forest Products (NTFP) are being destroyed through logging.”

Nevertheless, climate change is likely to exacerbate these problems by impacting directly on the biodiversity assets and ecosystem services of tropical forests. This will lead to indirect impacts like a decrease in water supply and quality, which in turn will lead to an increase in water related diseases, especially water-borne diseases following extreme rainfall.

Changes in temperature and rainfall will also alter the distribution of disease vectors - with malaria, dengue, and diarrhea particularly worrisome – as well as rodent and other pest populations.

In addition, climate change is likely to increase the frequency, persistence and magnitude of El Nino events, including forest fires, which can lead to significant health problems. For example, according to WHO data, more than 200 million people in South East Asia were affected by the 1997-98 forest fires in East Kalimantan, with cases of pneumonia and respiratory diseases increasing exponentially.

By and large, the likely impact of climate change on forests and human health needs far more attention and involvement from practitioners in both the health and forestry sectors globally.

In 2007 CIFOR organized a series of workshops - in Brazil, Cameroon, Ethiopia and West Kalimantan – to discuss the links between forests and human health. The findings from these events, as well as other research findings, will be presented at three upcoming meetings - in Geneva on 2 September, Stockholm on 4 September and Washington DC in early October - in order to make donors and policy makers more aware of these important, but often neglected, links.