Closing the Gap: The Crucial Link Between Climate Awareness and Adaptation/Mitigation Action

Climate change is one of the greatest public health challenges facing the world today.

Its impacts can already be seen across the globe and the world may continue to see it unless actions are taken urgently to mitigate it. These shifts in temperatures may be unnatural or man-made as a result of human activities.

The increased levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere have led to myriad problems that could affect human development. This may include damages from frequent natural disasters, sea-level rise, shortfall of food production, environmental degradation, etc, which, if not addressed, can slow down and undermine human health and development in general.

There is also growing concern amongst international policymakers that the effects of climate change may be a driver of increased migration flow. Although climate change-induced migration is still a relatively new phenomenon, extreme weather events linked to our changing climate can cause flooding, drought, poor yield of crops, etc, leading to huge migration of people.

The primary reason why our climate is continually changing is obviously because of our increased combustion of firewood and fossil fuels required for energy since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It's clear that the ratio between C12 and C13 has drastically changed since the Industrial Revolution, and it makes more sense that the increase in CO2 and the fact that it's predominantly C12 is a result of the Industrial Revolution.

For the past 100 years, scientists around the world have been looking at climate data from satellites to study weather patterns and to record changes in the atmosphere and soil composition. The planet is found to be steadily getting warmer as a result of rising temperatures, most notably from the 1970s. This global warming reflects long-term changes in the earth's climate.

Ideally, there are 3 carbon isotopes existing in the regular atmosphere in the form of carbon gases and two of them (C12 and C13) are not radioactive. The radioactive one, which is C14, is formed by cosmic rays, changing from N14 to C14.

Plants differentially uptake C12 as opposed to C13 during photosynthesis and the non-radioactive ones simply do not decompose in the process. However, the amount of C12 as CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing as continuously observed from the trapped bubbles of the Ice core. This is simply THE CHANGING CLIMATE.

In the past, changes in our climate were thought to have resulted from natural causes such as natural variations in the solar cycle and volcanic eruptions. However, until today, scientists failed to establish any explanation about what caused the global warming we have experienced in the past 100 years without correlating it with the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity known as anthropogenic emissions. This is because too large a concentration of greenhouse gas emissions upsets the planet's natural energy balance, thereby increasing global warming. 

1. It's estimated that each year, over 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere as a result of human activities.

2. The changes in our climate have a direct impact on what we grow and eat in Africa. 70% of the African population lives by farming and one-third (1/3) of the African economy is generated through agriculture.

3. 95% of African crops are primarily watered by rainfall. This makes food production on the continent vulnerable as a result of extreme weather events linked to climate change. These include changes to seasonal rainfall, droughts, flooding, and desertification. Statistically, rain-fed agriculture in Africa has already dropped by half from 2020.

4. Exposure to particulate matter (PM), ozone(O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), methylmercury, and hydrogen chloride attributed to the combustion of fossil fuels are not good for human health and vegetation due to high concentration of ozone layer, acid rain, and nitrogen deposition on the ecosystem.

5. Epidemiologically, it's predicted that there will be an increase of between 5% to 7% in vector-borne diseases by the end of this century, especially malaria. Most probably as a result of relatively higher temperatures, humidity, and seasonal variation caused by climate change.

Reference

1. https://www.epa.gov/climatechange-science/causes-climate-change
2. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/70-of-africans-make-a-living-through-agriculture-and-technology-could-transform-their-world/
3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainfed_agriculture
4. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10113-015-0761-x
5. https://www.epa.gov/pm-pollution/health-and-environmental-effects-particulate-matter-pm
6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6378404/