Dr. Courtney Howard spoke in Prince Albert Thursday about the effects of climate change not only on the planet, but on an individual level. (File photo/Brady Bateman)

By Brady Bateman

A warming planet

Discussing climate change, culture and health

Mar 15, 2019 | 11:57 AM

The effects of climate change have been widely discussed in scientific communities for years, but now many are talking about the effects climate change may cause on a much smaller scale.

Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency physician in Yellowknife and author of the 2017 and 2018 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change Briefing, spoke in Prince Albert Thursday about the effects climate change may have on individuals, and how people can protect their health – both now, and into the future.

“Climate change is having an impact on the health of Canadians now, and it is forecast to definitely get worse,” Howard said.

“Things that we are already seeing like severe wildfires, leading to evacuations including of hospitals like we saw in Fort McMurray. Evacuations can be associated with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. As well, wildfires send big clouds of smoke up into the air and those cause respiratory problems like asthma exasperations, which are increasingly shown to actually increase overall mortality.”

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Howard noted heat-related deaths are also becoming more common, adding Quebec saw 90 heat-related deaths last summer alone.

“In the prairies we’re seeing and expecting more droughts and floods and up north where I live, we’re 3 Celsius warmer than we were in the 1950s, which makes our ice-roads a lot less stable, so they aren’t passable for as much of the year. What that does is make building supplies more expensive, it makes it tougher for people to hunt and provide for their families so it’s thought to already have impact on food security by the scientists at Health Canada,” Howard said.

“These changes are happening on the scale of a human lifetime.”

Howard noted there are individual actions people can take to impact climate change, but said the most impactful choice an individual can make is to vote in elections.

“The most important action is to vote. The change needs to happen at a scale that we can’t each accomplish with the choices we can make in our individual lives,” Howard said.

“The changes we can make in our induvial lives are things like gradually eating less meat and more plant-based protein, and also flying less, because flying has a huge carbon footprint. As a province, when you look at where the emissions are in Saskatchewan a lot of the electricity is based on fossil fuels, so a real priority for the province needs to be reducing the amount of fossil fuel based electricity.”

In addition to changing ones diet, Howard noted individuals should seek out to power their own homes with more green technology such as wind and solar, also adding that a carbon tax can make an impact.

“When we look at public health campaigns in the past that have worked, a lot of them, like tobacco, have included making the thing that’s less desirable and less healthy more expensive so people gradually make choices that lead to healthier behaviour,” Howard said.

“Really that’s the attitude we have to take systematically towards things like fossil fuels we need to create systems where it’s easier for people to make good choices that benefit them and their family, that are also healthy for the environment.”

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brady.bateman@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @TheDigitalBirdy