Aborigines of Australia will Feel Global Warming Most

Australia’s Aborigines will suffer the effects of climate change more than other Australians, according to a report by the Medical Journal of Australia. Aborigines typically live in remote outback homes and due to factors like high rates of unemployment, substance abuse and domestic violence, their life expectancy is already 17 years shorter than the rest of the population.

The authors of the study warned that climate change would bring dangerously high temperatures and create ideal breeding conditions for diseases like malaria and dengue fever.

From Reuters:

“Elevated temperatures and increases in hot spells are expected to be a major problem for indigenous health in remote areas, where cardiovascular and respiratory disease are more prevalent and there are many elderly people with inadequate facilities to cope with the increased heat stress,” they wrote.

Other diseases such as bacterial diarrhoea, common in hot, dry areas like Australia’s desert interior and north, could rise by 18 percent among aboriginal communities, they said.

The report said Aborigines were also more at risk because of their close ties to traditional lands, where the health of people was often tied to the health of the environment around them.

“If the community-owned country (land) becomes “sick” through environmental degradation, climate impacts, or inability of the traditional owners to fulfill cultural obligations through ongoing management and habitation of their land, the people of that land will feel this “sickness” themselves,” it said.

Australia is already the world’s driest inhabited continent and is experiencing an accelerated form of climate change. Temperatures in the tropical north are expected to rise by 3 degrees celcius by 2050, making the already nearly unbearable summer heat even worse. The authors of the report are urging the Australian government to improve aboriginal health and housing, and broaden the focus of global warming efforts beyond western scientific methods.

Call me crazy, but I feel kind of guilty myself about the idea that the world’s poorest people are going to suffer the effects of global warming before any of the rest of us – and we’re the ones that have caused it. Sitting here in my temperature-controlled home, with an abundance of healthy food and access to medicine, I’m all too aware of how good I have it and how my comfortable American lifestyle is worsening global warming. I would imagine that a lot of other people reading this feel the same way.

Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: Penny Tweedie via The Guardian

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