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Climate change poses significant threats to public health and safety across California. This priority focuses on preventing and reducing these climate-driven health and safety threats and the importance of a comprehensive, equity-focused approach.
Climate-related damage to health can be immediate and acute, as well as sustained and long-term. Wildfires, for instance, can injure and kill people while creating toxic, hazardous smoke across the state that worsens respiratory and cardiovascular conditions. Wildfires also destroy homes and livelihoods, with cascading economic and mental health effects. Extreme heat, for example, can cause illnesses that require immediate hospitalization, as well as increase cumulative physiological stress on the human body, resulting in conditions such as kidney disease, adverse birth outcomes, or risk of suicide. As heat waves and droughts have intensified, their effect on several vector-borne, foodborne, waterborne, and soil-borne infectious diseases have already impacted Californians over the past decade and are expected to increase further resulting in many more illnesses and deaths. In addition to these physical health and safety impacts, medical professionals must also respond to climate anxiety and other mental health challenges caused or exacerbated by climate change.
These events also have impacts on food supply and security, water supply and sanitation, environmental hazards such as harmful algal blooms, and many others. Climate change is a threat multiplier, worsening existing health inequities. Even during natural life stages, like youth, old age, and pregnancy, climate impacts can uniquely stress the body with consequences for morbidity and mortality.