Extreme weather events pose risks to human health and put pressure on public health agencies, the Science Media Centre in Taiwan said yesterday.
The local branch of the British organization cited a study titled “Urban climate-health governance: Charting the role of public health in large global city adaptation plans,” which was published on Friday in the PLOS Climate journal and focused on global health adaptations to increasingly frequent extreme weather events in the past few decades.
Surveying adaptation plans in 22 relatively health-adaptive cities, the researchers found that 73 percent of them involved public health agencies, it said.
Those that involved public health agencies provided more precise data, warnings and maps, it added.
The study demonstrated the importance of robust climate adaptation plans based on public health expertise, said Lin Yu-kai (林于凱), an associate professor in the University of Taipei’s Department of Health and Welfare.
Taiwan should seek to improve the public’s climate-health awareness and provide better weather forecasts, Lin said.
Taiwan should implement systematically and comprehensively planned adaptation strategies that can be applied to all environments and groups of people, he said.
The strategies should include plans for the public and private sectors, and focus on protecting vulnerable groups and seek to increase collaboration with medical institutions, Lin added.
Better plans could help protect people and the environment, ease the medical and social burdens of extreme weather events, and prevent irreversible damages to the environment, he said.
Taiwan’s climate adaptation planning focuses mostly on health hazard and vulnerability assessment, prevention and adaptation planning, and climate-health surveillance and monitoring, he said.
Public health agencies are mostly involved in climate-health surveillance and monitoring, Lin added.
The government is testing early-warning systems for heat and other extreme weather events, he said.
However, the conclusions that can be drawn from the study are limited, as it mostly focused on high-income countries, making the application of the results in countries with scarcer resources difficult, Lin said.
Another challenge was the availability of comparable data across countries, he added.
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