|
Abstract
|
The globe is struggling with concurrent planetary health emergencies: COVID-19 and wildfires worsened by human activity. Unfortunately, a lack of awareness of climate change as a health issue, as well as of the interconnections between biodiversity loss, habitat change, inequality, and zoonotic infections risks having decision makers and the health sector neglect opportunities that have the ability to reduce the risk of both in future years. A fundamental reorientation is required: we must move from ego to eco in order to improve our ability to thrive.
Here, as acute care specialists and planetary health researchers and policy workers from four continents we outline severe impacts from recent wildfires in each of our parts of the globe in order to urgently communicate recent lived experience of the Anthropocene. We follow with suggested priority investments that will set us up to better-weather the wildfires and infectious disease threats of a climate-changed century as we emerge from COVID-19.
Starting in the North, in 2014, two and a half months of wildfire smoke in a rapidly-warming part of the Canadian subarctic resulted in one of the longest and most severe smoke exposures in the global evidence base. Analysis showed a full doubling of emergency room visits for asthma, with the highest rates seen in Indigenous Dene people [1]. Two years later, 120 patients at the Northern Lights Hospital in Fort McMurray, Alberta, were evacuated in hours as a wildfire overwhelmed the city [2].
Moving southwards, 2020 marked record heat waves in Western United States culminating in one of the largest wildfire seasons in California's modern history. Large portions of the Western coast of the US were exposed to high levels of wildfire smoke for a prolonged period of time, precipitating asthma attacks, strokes, and heart attacks [3].
At the time of writing, wildfires were once more raging across much of Western North America subsequent to a record-breaking and deadly heat wave...
Language: en |