Climate change and human health

Climate change is probably the most complex global challenge to have been identified by the environmental sciences since their inception. It has or could have major impacts on health, via various mechanisms that are more or less well characterized: increased frequency of extreme weather events and temperatures, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, changes in the distribution of infectious disease vectors and biodiversity.. Given that the main greenhouse gas-emitting sectors responsible for climate change (transport, agriculture, energy production) are also linked to major health risk factors (physical activity, diet, exposure to atmospheric pollutants, etc.), measures to adapt to and combat climate change could a priori be as much a threat to public health as an opportunity to improve it. More generally, given the commitment of governments to create greenhouse gas-neutral societies within the next thirty years, and the current role of fossil fuels in all sectors of activity, climate change is likely to lead to a rapid reinvention of all these sectors. Accompanying this reinvention by introducing a public health perspective represents a formidable challenge for the risk sciences. This will illustrate the ability of environmental health research to identify conditions that contribute to the well-being of populations, which is the side that prescribes, complementary to the other side, which proscribes and seeks to limit the effect of the pollutants of greatest concern, presented above.