How Many People Die Due to Climate Change?
Why should we care if the temperature of the planet goes up by a few degrees? It’s a reasonable question. Our planet has been much warmer than this before and plants and animals have adapted. The answer is, because of suffering, human suffering and animal suffering. On a global level, tiny increases in temperature have a huge impact on the planet. These small rises in temperature cause drought, water scarcity, heat-related death, intense storms, and plagues of mosquito-born diseases.
Missing Numbers
But who can tell us what impact all these climate-related changes are having on people? When I tried to pull together facts to share with the class I’m teaching about caring for creation, I found it difficult to find evidence of the damage a warming climate inflicts on human health and life expectancy.
Then yesterday I read an article that explained that we don’t know how many deaths are caused by climate change because this area has hardly been researched at all, at least not in a comprehensive way. It was an epidemiologist in Australia, Anthony McMichael, who gathered a team of researchers in the early 2000s to find out how many people were being killed as a result of climate change. They looked at malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea, cardiovascular disease (related to high heat) and flooding, and they developed computer models to calculate the degree to which climate change affected these deaths. They concluded that in one year 166,000 people had died as a result of global warming.
Shortly before his death in 2014 McMichael said, “Our mismanagement of the world’s climate and environment is weakening the foundations of health and longevity.”
How Many We’ve Lost
Last year, Colin Carlson, a global change biologist from Georgetown University, picked up where McMichael’s team had left off, and calculated the number of climate-change related deaths since 2000. He concluded there have been at least four million deaths due to global warming during that time. That’s more than the population of Denver.
He and other researchers think that number is far too low, because it doesn’t take into consideration many climate-related threats to life, such as non-malaria mosquito-born illness. For example, since 2023 dengue fever has increased, infecting nearly five million people and causing 5,000 deaths.
Carlson says he plans to pull together climate and health experts this year to begin working on more comprehensive computer models that will hopefully give a more accurate estimate of the human cost of climate change each year.
As grim as these numbers will be, I think they will help humans face the reality of what our actions are doing to real people and real families. As Christians, these numbers will help us figure out how to love our neighbor.