Maintaining safe environmental conditions is necessary to ensure the safety of people’s health. Moreover, keeping the environment clean helps to increase the quality of life and reduce the death rate. One of the most worrying issues the U.S. has been struggling with for ages is climate change, which affects the entire population. Environmental change is a genuine general medical problem, and intense activity is expected to tidy up significant wellsprings of carbon contamination and other ozone-harming substances, including power plants, vehicles, trucks, and other versatile sources. According to Ganesh and Smith (2018), “without continued progress on these issues, it will likely become more difficult in the future to address the potentially serious health implications of climate change” (p. 114). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the influence of the environmental problem on health and develop a policy for diminishing the challenge to protect human wellbeing and sustain the environment.
Primarily, there is a need to mention that the problem of global warming is not local – it is national. However, the health impacts are regional and may affect all layers of the population depending on where they work, live, or travel. The cities usually are mostly subjected to the effects of climate change as they are densely populated. For instance, “with the current chaotic policy environment in the United States, gains made in the policy addressing climate change may be reversed or halted at the federal level” (Ganesh & Smith, 2018, p. 114). The current policies suggest mitigation and adaptation activities that are not efficient enough in overcoming the global problem. Moreover, the system “focused on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated by energy, transport, industry and land use/agriculture, often leaving public health somewhat on the margins of climate action planning” (Fox et al., 2019, p. 2). Therefore, there is a need to implement a more stable policy that would secure people’s health and nature.
Wildfires, droughts, severe storms, and other natural phenomena caused by global warming severely affect the population’s health. Among the central disorders are heat-related diseases, injuries caused by flooding, asthma, cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses due to air pollution, and water-borne ailments caused by chemicals. Not only physical conditions are affected by global warming. Mental health suffers as well; for instance, the extreme weather events profoundly affected the American population after Hurricane Katrina (Ganesh & Smith, 2018). All these conditions can occur at once, and they are likely to have a cumulative effect.
To change the situation entirely, the government should spend billions of dollars so that the result is visible. Not only is the government a key stakeholder in amending the policy, but also the investors and companies may contribute to solving the issue. The government must expand on late advancement and seek new procedures to improve the nation’s readiness and versatility. In doing so, the stakeholder ought to advance:
- Reliable and committed partnerships and data sharing at all levels of government
- Risk-informed decision making and the devices that would alleviate the process of communicating these decisions
- Adaptive learning, in which practices serve as chances to advise and alter future activities
- Readiness arranging.
What else can the stakeholders do to reduce the effect of global warming on the nation’s health? In general, the existing mitigation policy should be significantly modified. “Reductions in emissions from fossil fuels reduce both air pollution and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, while safer active transport reduces rates of obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke and traffic injures” (WHO, 2017, p. 14). First, the investors should pay more attention to their climate and carbon assets risks and manage them. Moreover, they could use clean investment opportunities and engage with the companies to work together on energy consumption. In turn, state and private companies can decrease greenhouse emission gases, improve energy productivity, or reduce electricity demand. Moreover, they can implement renewable energy sources and install electricity-friendly machinery.
The most important thing to accomplish is to invest more in the improvement of health care services, which will also contribute to poverty and inequalities elimination. Universal access to health facilities is expected to protect weak layers of the population. Explicit mediations may get fundamental if there should be an occurrence of extraordinary occasions or then again calamities, (for example, vaccination and treatment battles). Activities to help nations in forestalling and shielding populations from antagonistic wellbeing impacts of environmental change should point to reinforce existing national wellbeing frameworks instead of setting up new structures.
To sum everything up, it is crucial to restate climate change threatens not only the U.S but the entire globe. Consequently, the effects of global warming affect people’s well-being. However, the existing policies do not cover a range of issues that need to be overcome. Therefore, it is necessary to implement a strategy or modify the existing one. As a result, several steps were included in the suggested policy. First, the partnership is crucial when it comes to overcoming a common enemy. Second, there should be a system of risk-informed decision-making. Then, adaptive learning and preparedness are needed to stop global warming affect humanity.
References
Fox, M., Zuidema, C., Bauman, B., Burke, T., & Sheehan, M. (2019). Integrating public health into climate change policy and planning: Sate of practice update. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(18), 1-22.
Ganesh, C., & Smith, J. (2018). Climate change, public health, and policy: A California case study. American Journal of Public Health. 118(2), 114-119.
WHO. (2017). Protecting health in Europe from climate change: Update 2017. Author.