A helicopter prepares to make a water drop as smoke billows along the Fraser River Valley near Lytton, British Columbia, on July 2, as a protracted heat wave fueled scores of wildfires in Canada's western provinces. Credit: James MacDonald/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As record-breaking heat has smothered much of the northern hemisphere, the impact of global warming on human health has been dramatically evident in deaths from high heat.
British Columbia initially reported almost 500 sudden heat deaths, three times higher than normal in early summer, while Multnomath County, Oregon, which includes Portland, first reported 45 heat-related deaths and Seattle reported 16.
The death toll underscored both the impact of climate change on human health and what a new report rates as poor performances by numerous nations in addressing health issues in their emissions and adaptation goals—known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs—as part of the Paris Agreement.
The report, by the California-based Global Climate and Health Alliance, concluded that of 40 countries whose NDCs were reviewed (one of which covered all 27 European Union nations), few provided more than superficial detail on how they would protect their citizens’ health from climate change. Even fewer specified how such health measures would be financed. Wealthier nations scored the worst in the report - link
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