Climate and weather are already having a strong impact on health: during periods of high temperatures and natural disasters such as floods, patterns of life-threatening transmissible diseases such as malaria are changing.

According to Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), continued climate change will have an extremely negative impact on food, air and water, which are some of the key health factors. Developing countries, especially those with weak health infrastructure, will not be able to prepare for and respond to these changes without foreign assistance.

The following selected FACTS focus on the current and expected effects of climate change on health .

• Over the past 50 years, large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have been released into the air as a result of human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by more than 30% from the level before the "industrial revolution", which leads to the retention of very hot air in the lower atmosphere. As a result, global climate change poses a number of health risks - such as deaths from high temperatures, changes in infectious disease patterns, and so on.
• From the tropics to the Arctic, climate and weather have a direct and indirect impact on human life. Extreme weather events, such as heavy rains, floods, and natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in the United States in August 2005, endanger people's health, destroy property, and deprive them of livelihoods. In the 1990s, air-related natural disasters killed 600,000 people worldwide, 95% of them in poor countries.
• Short-term intense changes in the weather can also have a serious impact on health, creating thermal stress (hyperthermia) or extreme cooling (hypothermia), which can increase mortality from heart and respiratory (respiratory) diseases. Studies have shown that the highest temperatures in Western Europe in the summer of 2003 led to a sharp rise in deaths - an estimated 77,000 more deaths than in the same period last year.The global rise in temperature, like plant pollen that causes asthma, affects the level of airborne and particulate matter of anthropogenic and natural origin, as well as seasonal distribution patterns. About 300 million people suffer from asthma, and in 2005 250,000 people died from the disease. Unless urgent action is taken to prevent climate change and be prepared for the consequences, asthma deaths are expected to increase by about 20% in the next 10 years.