Climate-Related System Failures and Emerging Public Health Vulnerabilities

A decade ago, the late climate scholar Anthony McMichael issued a clarion call to the research and policy communities for action around climate-induced system failures, noting that “human-induced climatic changes often act in concert with environmental, demographic, and social stressors that variously influence regional food yields, nutrition, and health” (NEJM, 368(14):1335-1343). Systemic pressures on any number of food, water, energy, and health systems would lead to increased population vulnerability, the introduction of new zoonotic diseases and novel viruses, and massively disruptive population migration. Despite recent international efforts to address these emerging threats, including the 2015 Paris Agreement and the 2022 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Egypt (COP 27), many questions remain: is population vulnerability deepening, is it increasingly inequitable, and are there adaptation and mitigation strategies that can effectively address such vulnerabilities?

This Research Topic will gather a series of papers characterizing the nature of the potential or actual system disruptions, and estimating the public health-related vulnerabilities that will be a consequence of such failures. The editors invite contributions that address specific climate-related system failures and emerging public health vulnerabilities, as well as strategies within the public health and health systems to adapt to or address the effects. In particular, the editors are seeking commentaries, reviews, or original research papers focused on the following systems, among others:

- Emerging vulnerabilities as a result of population migration / displacement

- Emerging vulnerabilities as a result of lowered water tables / drought / sea level rise

- Emerging vulnerabilities as a result of massively altered food systems (agriculture / aquaculture)

- Emerging vulnerabilities as a result of mis- and dis-information about climate effects

- Emerging vulnerabilities as a result of political instability or insufficient political commitment

- Emerging vulnerabilities as a result of pressures on public health and health systems.

We acknowledge the funding of the manuscripts published in this Research Topic by New York University (NYU). We hereby state publicly that NYU has had no editorial input in articles included in this Research Topic, thus ensuring that all aspects of this Research Topic are evaluated objectively, and unbiased by any specific policy or opinion of NYU.

Keywords: Climate emergency, public health, health systems, environmental stressors, social stressors, demographic stressors

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.