Aborigines suffer most from climate change
The report’s authors suggest that increased temperatures are likely to cause cardiovascular and respiratory problems as well as an increase in diseases such as dengue fever and bacterial diarrhoea, which tend to thrive in hot and dry conditions. They believe that Aboriginal communities will suffer more than other Australians because ‘their vulnerability to climate change is intensified by the social and economic disadvantage they already experience’.
Climate change’s impact on traditional land is also likely to have an effect on Aboriginal people’s ‘spiritual health’, say the report’s authors. ‘The psychological well-being of indigenous people is frequently connected to the well-being of the land, the spiritual connection and the whole cohesion of the community itself,’ Dr Donna Green of the University of New South Wales told the Independent.
Aboriginal people make up 2.4 per cent of Australia’s population of 21 million people, and more than one quarter live in remote areas. Despite improvements in life expectancy during the 1970s and ’80s, they still die on average around 17 years earlier than the rest of the Australian population.
March 2009
Climate change’s impact on traditional land is also likely to have an effect on Aboriginal people’s ‘spiritual health’, say the report’s authors. ‘The psychological well-being of indigenous people is frequently connected to the well-being of the land, the spiritual connection and the whole cohesion of the community itself,’ Dr Donna Green of the University of New South Wales told the Independent.
Aboriginal people make up 2.4 per cent of Australia’s population of 21 million people, and more than one quarter live in remote areas. Despite improvements in life expectancy during the 1970s and ’80s, they still die on average around 17 years earlier than the rest of the Australian population.
March 2009
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