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Climate Change and Human Health: Building Australia’s Adaptation Capacity

The links between climate change and health have been reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which states that climate change is already contributing to the global burden of disease and premature death and that these effects are likely to increase in all countries. The extent and nature of future health impacts will depend on the nature and magnitude of climate change. Climate change is a global issue, but it will not be experienced uniformly across the globe, and a significant proportion of adaptation measures will need to be developed and implemented at a local or regional level. Understanding the pathway from climate change to predicted health impacts can provide us with critical information for planning effective adaptation strategies. Health impact pathways can occur through a range of direct or indirect exposures. Direct exposures refer to immediate health impacts that occur as a direct result of a climate variable. This type of exposure usually refers to impacts caused by extreme events such as flooding, fires, and heat waves. Indirect exposures occur when climate affects a range of environmental parameters such as air, water, or food quality; food production and disease vectors; or social parameters such as changes to population distribution and economic variables. The pathway between climate and health impact for indirect exposures typically includes multiple steps, many of which occur in nonhealth sectors. Australia adopted a novel approach to build national adaptive capacity to respond to the threats posed by climate change. The Australian government called for tenders for collaborations to host a National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF), which would generate the knowledge required for Australia to adapt to the physical impacts of climate change and oversee the roll out of Adaptation Research Networks (ARNs) across Australia. A nine member consortium led by Griffith University’s Gold Coast Campus was successful, and NCCARF was established in November 2007 (http://www.nccarf.edu.au/about-facility). Soon afterwards, the Federal Department of Climate Change (now Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency) was established in December 2007. NCCARF then repeated the tender process, calling for proposals from nationwide collaborations of researchers to host ARNs across eight key research domains: terrestrial biodiversity; human health; marine biodiversity and resources; water resources and freshwater biodiversity;