Climate change could cause over 500,000 extra deaths in 2050

Health impacts due to changes in agricultural production are currently examined

Health impacts due to changes in agricultural production are currently examined

A new study - published in The Lancet medical journal- reveals that climate change could cause over 500,000 extra deaths in 2050 from illnesses including cancer, heart disease and stroke. It is a modeling study, where excess mortality attributable to agriculturally mediated changes in dietary and weight-related risk factors by cause of death is estimated for 155 world regions in the year 2050.

Extreme weather events including floods and heat waves are severely impacting harvests and crop yields and as a result, diets could change significantly. Food availability per person could be reduced by 3.2% by 2050, the consumption of fruit and vegetables could be cut by 4% and the amount of red meat consumed might drop by 0.7%, the study said.

In a statement, Marco Springmann, the lead author of the study from the University of Oxford, said: "Even modest reductions in the availability of food per person could lead to changes in the energy content and composition of diets, and these changes will have major consequences for health".

Climate change impacts could cause approximately 529,000 extra deaths in 2050, compared to a future without climate change and these are projected to occur mostly in South and East Asia.

"There should be enough food to produce a better diet in 2050 than we currently have globally but if you add in climate change then you lose some of those improvements," study co-author Peter Scarborough from the University of Oxford told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "We need to be mitigating greenhouse gasses. If we do, it will bring down the health impact of climate change", he said.

Source: Reuters