Translated information to share about climate and health:
Stay Safe in the Heat: A comic with guidance on preventing heat illnesses during hot weather:
Amharic | Arabic | Chinese | English | Filipino | French | Korean | Russian | Somali | Spanish | Ukrainian | Vietnamese
Survivor Tales: In Deep Water: A comic book with practical tips on recovering after a flood:
Chinese | English | Spanish | Vietnamese
Preparing for wildfire smoke (Available in 26 languages. Click on “Resources in other languages” on the right hand column, or at the bottom if viewing on a cellphone)
Did you know climate change could be making your asthma worse? That it’s making allergy season longer? That more people risk getting sick or dying as summer temperatures get hotter?
2023 brought us the hottest summer on record globally, making more people aware of climate change and its impact on our environment. However, not many people know about the impact climate change can have on our health.
To help bring awareness and inform future actions, Public Health – Seattle & King County has launched a new set of data dashboards that explore some of the impacts of climate change on the health of King County residents.
In the Pacific Northwest, climate change is leading to longer, hotter summers and more intense wildfire seasons. These weather events have a wide range of impacts on our health, both short-term and long-term. They can cause heart and lung problems, heat stroke, and even lead to mental health distress, among other things. They can also put stress on our healthcare system as emergency department visits and 911 calls increase.
Gathering information on these health impacts in our community will allow us to understand trends over time, identify disparities in who is most impacted, establish potential areas for action, and inform future planning and investment.
Note that these dashboards provide a sample of how climate impacts our health. They are not a complete representation of the many health risks caused by climate change.
Explore the data indicators we are tracking below and how they relate to climate change.
Heat-related illness
Extreme heat caused by climate change is becoming more frequent and intense. This can lead to illness and even death, as we saw with the 2021 heat dome in the Pacific Northwest.
Cold-related illness
Cold-related illness includes hypothermia and frostbite. Global warming is decreasing the frequency and intensity of extremely cold weather, but we will continue to experience these events in the near future.
Asthma
Burning fossil fuels pollutes our air and contributes to global warming. Hotter summer temperatures also lead to more wildfires and extreme weather that make our air quality worse. This can lead to an increase in symptoms for people who have asthma.
Seasonal Allergies
Changing weather patterns caused by climate change are affecting the release of pollen and pollutants into the air. This can lead to an increase in allergy symptoms for people who have seasonal allergies.
Foodborne and waterborne illness
Climate change can lead to increases in illnesses caused by bacteria and parasites that are found in our food and water. Higher temperatures promote the growth of certain bacteria and can expand their habitats. Heavier rainfall and flooding may increase the number of parasites found in water and contaminate our water sources.
Public Health is currently tracking four of these illnesses: vibriosis, giardiasis, campylobacteriosis, and cryptosporidiosis. View the dashboard and more information on these illnesses here.
Vector-borne disease
Warmer temperatures and increased rainfall may change or expand the habitat of organisms that carry disease (vectors) like mosquitos and ticks, as well as the animals that host them, like mice and deer. This can lead to an increase in cases of diseases such as Lyme, Malaria, and West Nile virus, among many others. While these are now extremely rare in King County, monitoring this data is important as climate change intensifies.
How to use the data dashboards
Our quick tutorial takes just a minute to walk you through the features in the dashboard.
Where disparities emerge
Climate change can worsen many health inequities already present in our society, as communities of color and low-income households tend to be impacted the most. This is due to many factors such as where people live, the work they do, and the healthcare resources they have access to – all things influenced by structural and environmental racism. Older adults, children, pregnant people, and people with certain medical conditions like asthma, diabetes, and heart disease are also particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change.
A first look at the dashboards shows some disparities emerging from the data. For example, when breaking down by age, older adults (ages 75+) were the most likely to visit the emergency department (ED) for heat-related and cold-related illness in the past few years. This group is more sensitive to heat due to age, chronic illness, or medications they may be taking.
When looking by race and ethnicity, the rate of ED visits for heat-related illness was highest among Black residents. They visited the ED for heat-related illness at roughly double the rate of Hispanic and White residents and four times the rate of Asian residents. Black King County residents were also overrepresented among ED visits for cold-related illness, along with American Indian and Alaska Native residents.
While there is a lot to learn from these dashboards, it’s also important to note their limitations. Measuring the number of residents visiting the ED or responded to by Emergency Medical Services, for example, does not capture people who may be ill but do not seek medical attention for various reasons — distrust of healthcare providers, lack of insurance, lack of transportation, language barriers, and more. These dashboards also do not represent all of climate change’s impacts on health. For example, there have been serious mental health impacts associated with climate change, especially among young people, but we aren’t able to include that in these dashboards due to a lack of local data.
Data is important to King County’s climate work
The climate and health data dashboards are another step in Public Health’s work to center climate change in the agency’s programming, and are one of the action items in the King County 2020-2025 Strategic Climate Action Plan.
Other King County agencies are using data to inform their climate work: A heat mapping project done in 2020 by King County, Seattle Public Utilities, and the City of Seattle showed how local temperatures vary due to differences in land use, tree cover, and geography. Areas with more pavement and fewer trees, for example, get hotter and stay hot for longer. Those results have informed both short-term and long-term actions related to emergency management, public health, land use, urban planning, conservation and more.
Information from the climate and health data dashboards will be useful to the County as well as community organizations, researchers, representatives of the media, and others in King County working on climate change impacts. This data can help raise awareness to the public as well as decision-makers of how climate change is impacting health, encourage action to move away from fossil fuels, and inform measures to create climate-resilient communities.
Ultimately, to protect the public’s health, our society urgently needs to work to reduce its use of fossil fuels and slow global warming. As Health Officer Dr. Jeff Duchin has said, “Climate change is a health emergency – and reducing greenhouse gas emissions is literally a matter of life and death.”
Learn more about what King County is doing about climate change on our climate action page.
Originally published January 25, 2024.