Interdisciplinary Regional Collaboration for Public Health Adaptation to Climate Change in the Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract

The World Health Organization has estimated that in 2012 approximately 23% of all deaths worldwide were attributed to changeable environmental factors, which may be potentially influenced by climate change (WHO 2016). In addition, the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change determined that “climate change could be the greatest public health threat of the twenty-first century” (Watts et al. 2015, 2017, 2018). There is clear evidence that climate change in the last 50 years has affected human health (e.g., Patz et al. 2005; Peretz et al. 2011; Mirsaeidi et al. 2016). Specifically, in the whole Mediterranean region, climate change leads to alterations in the mean, variability, seasonality, and extremes in one or more climatic variables, such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, and aerosols (Ulbrich et al. 2013), thus may influence the incidence of various climate sensitive diseases.