Development of Strategy for Community-Based Adaptation to the Health Impact of Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change is a global public health problem. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that changes in temperature, precipitation, and other weather variables due to climate change are likely to affect the health status of millions of people, particularly those with low adaptive capacity. We can better prepare to develop adaptive strategies in the community. The research aims to explore linkages between climate change and health risks in selected communities, to evaluate the effectiveness of community-based health adaptation to climate change, to develope the public health intervention, as well as to offer development strategy for community-based adaptation. We selected 12 urban and 10 rural communities in Korea. Changes in the risk of disease(ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, heat-related illness) were estimated to be increased by 1 °C based on a statistical test using a generalized additive model adjusted for non-temperature related factors: time trends, seasonality, and humidity. The research encompasses 7 year time-frame(2003-2009) of moderately warm months(May-September). Outcome of the research showed that relative risk of ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, heat-related illness were 1.041, 1.030, 1.122-1.139, respectively, thus, proved the strongest linkages in this context. No such concrete and distinctive features were observed for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease in the rural areas. Furthermore, the research examined the linkage between performance of health adaptation and health risk to evaluate the effectiveness of community health adaptation to climate change. The estimates of health risk tend to be low in the community with high performance level(in terms of qualitative evaluation). Finally, we developed a public health intervention for those with hypertension during heat episodes and evaluated the effectiveness of the program. After the program, self-efficacy in the case group was higher than that of the control group(p=.008). Knowledge score was 15.44(±2.03) for the case group and 11.10(±2.96) for the control group after the intervention(p Nowadays, the priority is still not high, but there are considerable interest about climate change and health. We are hoping that community health adaptation strategies and the people's perception on the climate change and health from this research may serve as an effective reference to policy makers as well as experts committed to improve health adaptation strategies to climate change.