Effects of droughts on daily mortality in Iberian Peninsularisks and vulnerability

Resumo

The prestigious 2018 Lancet report on climate and health "The Lancet Countdown: tracking progress on health and climate change" begins with the devastating phrase "The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that in 2012 12.6 million deaths (23% of all the deaths in the world) were attributable to modifiable environmental factors, many of which could be influenced by climate change or be related to driving forces of climate change" (Watts et al., 2017). These cold WHO numbers confirm that the research on the relationship of climatic factors on health should be a priority issue for public health services, especially considering that climate change already observed and the foreseeable will act as a multiplying factor of the threat to global health. Climate change projections indicate that droughts will be more frequent and intense in the 21st century in several regions in the world, such as Southern Europe (e.g., Stewart et al., 2015, Ebi and Bowen, 2016; Sapionini et al., 2017, Guerreiro et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2018, WHO,2018; Zhaoli et al., 2018), involving a greater threat to the health of the population given that droughts are widely considered as the most complex, costly and destructive climatic extremes that affect more people than any other climatic event, being responsible for a notable burden of morbidity and mortality worldwide (Willhite, 2000; Kallis et al., 2008; Stanke et al., 2013; Sena et al., 2015). In recent years up to 50 million people per year have suffered intense droughts. However, droughts are also the least understood events due to the complexity in assigning their onset and end of the events as well as the indirect, diffuse and accumulated effects in time. There are hardly studied focused on the analysis of the details on the links between drought and health effects and there are rather fewer assessments focused on the evaluation of what measures and characteristics of droughts are the most predictive to reflect health effects. In this context, Iberian Peninsula (southwestern Europe) is a region prone to droughts, where this meteorological extreme is described as the main hydroclimatic phenomena. Several studies have indicated that the magnitude and frequency of droughts have increased during the last few decades in the most of territory (Vicente Serrano y Cuadraprats, 2007; Vicente Serrano et al., 2011; Páscoa et al., 2017) and attending to climate change projections, in this territory droughts will likely become more severe and intense during 21st century. (Vicente Serrano, 2014). For first time, in this PhD work a diagnostic study of daily time series will be carried out in the last three decades about the effects of droughts on daily natural, circulatory and respiratory-cause mortality. The performance of different drought indices will be compared to estimate the health risks associated to droughts, and the vulnerability among the exposed population will be also analysed (different sex and advance age groups). Moreover, the short-term effects of heatwaves and atmospheric pollution will be additionally controlled