Climate Change and Health & Well-Being: A Policy Primer for Canada's North

Climate Change and Health Impact and Adaptation Assessment Guidelines

All countries will have to adapt to changing climatic conditions. Therefore, further exploration of the potential impacts of climate variability and change on the health of citizens in various countries and regions is required. Signatory nations to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are obliged to conduct regular national assessments of the impacts of climate change, including those on human health, every seven years and to report the results to the UNFCCC. Such assessments can be of help to national, territorial and Aboriginal governments in Canada in identifying, assessing and managing the risks to human health and well-being which may result from climate change and climate variability.

In 2000, Health Canada, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) committed to developing generic tools and methods for use by national environmental health agencies. The first workshop on the preparation of guidelines to assess the health impacts of climate change - Climate Change and Health Impact Assessment Guidelines -was convened by WHO and Health Canada in Victoria, Canada in February 2001. A second workshop was convened by WHO and Health Canada in Geneva, Switzerland in March, 2002 to review the first draft and discuss next steps for the development of the guidelines. Applied/practical assessments conducted according to these guidelines will identify the likelihood and potential magnitude of impacts to human health and well-being, resulting from climate change and climate variability. They will complement and integrate other related activities¹⁰ such as the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment which is an international project of the Arctic Council and the International Arctic Science Committee, to evaluate and synthesize knowledge on climate variability, climate change, and increased ultraviolet radiation and their consequences (www.acia.uaf.edu ).

In Canada, the guidelines will be implemented by federal, provincial, territorial and Aboriginal governments, specifically health departments, with support from academic and research institutions, economic sectors, non-governmental organizations, health and social organizations, traditional knowledge experts, health service providers and other relevant stakeholders.

Following the applied assessment, each government health and social service authority in the North will be equipped with the necessary information to properly assess the capacity of their public health infrastructure to respond adequately to climate change impacts on health, and to plan and strengthen their public health infrastructure where gaps or opportunities are identified. Current public health programmes may be additionally stressed by climate change, and may need to be modified. Alternatively, policy makers may simply need to account for climate change and variability in future health and social planning.

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¹⁰See Aynslie Ogden et al. "State of Knowledge Assessment for Climate Change Impacts in Northern Canada", Northern Climate ExChange . (www.taiga.net/nce )and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, "Arctic Pollution Issues: A State of the Arctic Environment Report", Oslo, Norway, 1997 (www.grida.no/amap ) The Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network (C-CIARN) lead by Natural Resources Canada is also involved in climate change monitoring and reporting activities in Canada's North.