Outlook on climate change adaptation in the Tropical Andes mountains

Health

Health policies in the region that explicitly address climate change effects are generally guided by the perspective of disaster risk reduction. Extreme events are prevalent in the mountains and thus are important for mountain communities, but climate change will also affect health more broadly, such as by affecting

climate change will generally exacerbate already- prevalent diseases and will threaten people who are already vulnerable to health problems. Latin American countries have in general made significant progress in expanding health-care coverage (Atun et al., 2015). However, remote and poor communities are still disproportionally lacking health care. This increases the risk from climatic changes in addition to other health risks affecting vulnerability to these changes. Policy gaps • Lack of mountain-specific health policies for addressing climate change impacts and general lack of access to health care in poor and remote communities. • Insufficient cross-sectoral coordination and vertical integration (from the national to the local level) on targeting vulnerable groups with health care and development measures that take account of climate change. • Insufficient research generated about the indirect effects of climate change on health. For instance, climate change impacts on water availability may result in higher rates of infectious diseases due to strained sanitation systems. The effects of climate change on agriculture and nutrition may also impact on health. Opportunities People’s health may reflect impacts of both extreme events and climate change. Thus, there is an opportunity for multisectoral work on adaptation to improve peoples’ health.

economic development and nutrition. In the tropical Andean countries there are also increasing efforts to understand the effects of climate change on vector- borne (e.g. malaria, Zika, dengue) and respiratory diseases (e.g. asthma and respiratory tract infections). As the fourth IPCC report (Field et al., 2012) notes,

Woman weaving, Cajamarca, Peru

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