3 March 2016
By Damian Carrington

Climate change could kill more than 500,000 people a year (click here) globally by 2050 by making their diets less healthy, according to new research published in the Lancet.

The research is the first to assess how the impacts of global warming could affect the quality of the diets available to people and found fewer fruit and vegetables would be available as a result of climatic changes. These are vital in curbing heart disease, strokes and diet-related cancers, leading the study to conclude that the health risks of climate change are far greater than thought.

Climate change is already judged by doctors as the greatest threat to health in the 21st century, due to floods, droughts and increased infectious diseases, with the potential to roll back 50 years of progress.

Peter Scarborough, at the University of Oxford and part of the new research, said these direct impacts would affect tens of thousands of people at particular times: “But everyone in the world eats, so small changes in diet can quickly add up” to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

“The health burden related to climate change is much bigger than we thought,” Scarborough said. But cutting carbon emissions and improving education and the availability of fruit and vegetables would reduce the number of deaths, he said....