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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
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,
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.
Woman weaving, Cajamarca, Peru