Review of the Draft Interagency Report on the Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States

By: Engineering and Medicine and National Academies of Science

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: The U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA; Melillo et al., 2014) identified a number of ways in which climate change is affecting or is likely to affect, people, infrastructure, natural resources, and ecosystems. Those impacts in turn have the potential for important current and future consequences for human health. Research on these impacts is active, with strong evidence to support some aspects and research still in progress for others. Therefore, there is a need to assess our understanding of how the impacts of climate change on the environment can create stressors that can affect human health in a number of dimensions both now and in the future.
In response to this need, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has initiated an interagency Assessment on the Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States. The Assessment is intended to inform public health authorities, other planning and policy entities, and the general public. It extends the work begun under the 2008 Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.6 (USGCRP, 2008) Analyses of the Effects of Global Change on Human Health and Welfare and Human Systems and the third NCA released in 2014.