Surgery and Climate Change: The Scientific and Public Policy Implications

Abstract

Although there has been a considerable body of literature examining the human health effects of global climate change, little has been published on the relationship between surgery and climate change. This project aimed to introduce and develop the under-researched field of surgery and climate change through the publication of the first systematic works delineating the field of research of surgery and climate change, and defining the field's paradigm of research. The PhD by publications sought to outline how climate change impacts upon surgical practice, under various climatic scenarios, and how surgery itself contributes to climate change, through having a carbon footprint of its own. Climate change is likely to have both direct and indirect impacts upon human health. Direct impacts may arise from increased injuries arising from severe weather events, including bushfires, floods, winds and superstorms. Indirect effects may involve injuries arising from the flow-on effects of heat, such as a possible increase in violent activities (known in the literature as the “heat hypothesis”), as well as effects arising from economic decline and dislocation, if the transition to sustainability is not successfully made: see the candidate's work not submitted for this award: J. W. Smith and S. Positano, The Self-Destructive Affluence of the First World: The Coming Crises of Global Poverty and Ecological Collapse, (Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, New York, 2010). The published works explore the impact of climate change upon surgical practice (and vice versa) under various scenarios, especially the position that climate change may be far more severe than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (e.g. as proposed by James Hansen and other climatologists), that future temperature rises, along with a multitude of converging and compounding global environmental crises (peak oil, resource depletion, water shortages, biodiversity decline and species extinction, to name a few), constitutes an existential threat to modern civilisation and the sustainability of socio-medical practices such as surgery.