Page 52 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)
P. 52
Francesco Bosello
mics of coastal areas, affecting our infrastructure such as roads, buildings, ener-
gy transmission networks, ultimately affecting industry.
Therefore, another important aspect is that climate change is directly and
indirectly affecting health, through the spread and intensity of diseases, with
changes in mortality and morbidity.
The question is: how is climate change affecting all these areas of
impact? The net effect is that, in general, climate change is increasing the risk
of a set of major threats. The latest IPCC report identifies five reasons for
concern.
The first one is risks to “unique and threatened systems”: not only there
are ecosystems which are unique but the IPCC also claims that there are social
and cultural systems that could be at risk of extinction. One another major
threat is extreme weather events, an area which encompasses extreme droughts,
extreme precipitations, extreme floods and the risk of such phenomena is on
the increase.
One more area of concern is the global aggregate impact: this means that
there could be a situation in which we have so many impacts interacting and
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