Climate Change: Human Health-Related Risks and Vulnerability—Some Global and Local (Bulgarian) Pictures

Abstract

Changes in climate and weather extremes affect the environment that provides us with clean air, food, water, shelter, and security. Climate change (CC), together with other natural and human-made health stressors, threatens human health and well-being in numerous ways. The most affecting climatic factors are an increasingly warmer climate, periods with extreme maximum and minimum temperatures, lasting and intensive precipitations, disastrous weather phenomena (windstorms, cyclones, floods), droughts, poor air quality, stratospheric ozone depletion, and corresponding changes in ultraviolet (UV) radiation. The present work reviews the health effects of climate change worldwide, for Europe, and—to a certain extent—for the territory of Bulgaria, and assesses the population’s sensitivity to these changes as well as the willingness of the health sector in Bulgaria to cope with the challenges of climate change, giving thus an idea about the general vulnerability of the human health sector to the changes of climate.