While most discourse on climate change tends to focus on curbing emissions and mitigating its future effects, there is increasing evidence that the effects of a warming planet are already being felt.
With extreme weather events increasing in intensity and frequency – from droughts and heatwaves, as in Malta, to cyclones and floods – talk is increasingly turning to adaptation: how practical action can help manage the risks.
“We have to assume things are going to get worse no matter what we do, so we have to prepare for what’s on the way,” Australian climate epidemiologist Hilary Bambrick told Times of Malta.
“We have to be ready to manage the unexpected. While we have a good sense of what may come, there are so many things happening already which are outside our previous experience.”
Prof. Bambrick, who is head of the School of Public Health at Queensland University of Technology, is currently in Malta addressing a conference on environmental health organised by the President's Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society.
The focus of her work has been on how climate change presents new challenges to public health, and what steps societies can take to prepare themselves.
Rising sea levels mean salt water inundating drinkable water sources
These effects may be more obvious in areas prone to extreme events like flooding, bush fires and cyclones, but countries like Malta will not be spared either.
Rising sea levels mean salt water inundating drinkable water sources, drought affects the availability of food and water, and extreme heatwaves affect people’s capacity to work and could be fatal to the elderly and the infirm.
Moreover, a warmer climate could allow mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue to thrive in new areas, exposing new populations to transmission.
For Prof. Bambrick, all this points to the need to integrate climate change into the often short-term approach of health service planning, and to take specific measures to prepare the population for new challenges.
Rising sea levels will be a threat to Malta."Adaptation strategies don’t have to be high-tech solutions," she said. "One of the best things we can do is to have a healthier population: a more active, better nourished population will be more resilient overall."
Long-term thinking is also important in construction, according to Prof. Bambrick: ensuring that buildings are well equipped for rising temperatures and flash floods, and avoiding areas which could become prey to rising sea levels.
"If anyone is in doubt that the climate is changing and we need to be prepared in the way we build things, just look at insurance companies and what they’re no longer willing to insure. We have to plan ahead."
This sort of thinking also goes hand-in-hand with measures to mitigate climate change in future. Investing in efficient public transport, Prof Bambrick suggests, would help to reduce emissions while also encouraging a more active population.
“If we get rid of all coal today, we’d have cleaner air today, and that brings significant benefits immediately,” she said. “Thousands die every year due to air pollution, even in countries we don’t think of as excessively polluted.”
In the meantime, optimism over our ability to limit climate change, which peaked with the ambitious Paris Agreement in 2015, has dipped recently, particularly after US President Donald Trump announced rollbacks of key policies from the previous administration.
But Prof. Bambrick said she retained hope that most of the world continued to move in the right direction, particularly in the field of renewable technology, while civil society initiatives increasingly filled in the gaps.
“We’ve come to the recognition that we can’t just wait for governments to do things,” she said.
“There are lots of people working very hard at grassroots level to make sure we do make the changes we need to make, and I still have optimism that we’re going to get things right. We just have to do it very quickly, because we’re running out of time.”