Navigating the health frontiers of Africa’s climate challenge - Nature.com
Navigating the health frontiers of Africa’s climate challenge | Nature Medicine
Fortunate Machingura heads CeSHHAR Zimbabwe’s Climate, Environment, and Health Department and is also a lecturer at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. She describes her pivot from HIV research to another crucial challenge facing Africa: climate change.
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Machingura, F. Navigating the health frontiers of Africa’s climate challenge. Nat Med (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03061-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03061-z
Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”