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PARIS • More than 150 million vulnerable people around the world have been exposed to potentially life-threatening heatwaves, a study said yesterday, stressing that climate change poses an unprecedented risk to the health of the planet.
In a global inventory of public health trends, dozens of international agencies said people over 65, city-dwellers in large cities and people with heart and lung diseases were all exposed to increased risk of death or disability due to extreme heat.
The warning came as the United Nations meteorological body had declared that the past four years, including this year, had been the hottest ever recorded.
In total, 153 billion hours of work were lost due to heat exposure last year, including 7% of the total time spent working in India, said the study's authors, adding that the cost of protecting people from heatwaves was likely to increase dramatically. as our planet heats up.
The outlook is particularly difficult for Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, where rising temperatures and the aging of the population have caused a "perfect storm" of risk factors, according to the author principal of the study.
"For a very, very long time, we thought that climate change would affect the environment in 2100," told Agence France-Presse, Dr. Nick Watts, executive director of Countdown on Health and Health. climate changes.
"When you consider climate change as a public health problem, it really turns your head around – it's not just about polar bears or rainforests, it's also affecting communities, children, families in the UK, from Europe and the world ". world."
The study team included experts from 27 institutions around the world, who mapped various climate and health trends.
Dr. Watts and his team found that, while global temperatures have risen 0.3 ° C since the mid-1980s, the average temperature rise among those most at risk of d & # 39; heat exposure was more than doubled, to 0.8 ° C.
This has been attributed to a combination of factors, including migration to cities – vulnerability to heat waves due to "the urban heat island effect" – as well as a more extreme localized heat , while climate change is having devastating effects on our weather systems.
FRANCE MEDIA AGENCY
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