The second part discusses the impacts on health, society and the environment, as well as highlighting actions people are taking throughout the U.S. to decrease the effects of climate change 9NEWS Medical Expert Dr. Comilla Sasson answers some common questions.
QUESTION: What is climate change?
The Earth’s temperature has risen by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, with most of the earth’s warming occurring in the last 35 years.
QUESTION: What role does climate change play in the extremes we are seeing, with hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and extreme flooding?
QUESTION: How does the rise in temperature impact our health?
• Decrease in Air Quality- This is a result of higher levels of pollutants in the air, as well as ozone levels being impacted.
• Increase in Allergens- With the change in air quality and changing drought versus rainfall, the amount of dust, pollen and mold in the air is changing and causing a worsening of seasonal allergies.
QUESTION: There is also a rise in diseases that can be spread because of changes in our climate.
• Change in Illnesses Spread by Mosquitoes, Ticks and other Vectors- As the weather patterns change and we see warmer temperatures and more extremes in rainfall, we are going to see more illnesses spread by ticks and mosquitos like West Nile, Zika, Lyme Disease.
ANSWER: States are doing more to help with extremes of weather conditions (e.g. cooling areas during heat waves), preparing for wildfires, climate-proofing health care system infrastructure (e.g. making sure hospitals are prepared for hurricanes), monitoring the water supply especially during drought seasons, and actively watching for disease outbreaks.

The director general of the Meteorological Organization of Mazandaran province in northern Iran says widespread drought in the country is driving migration to his province as farmers look for land with a more plentiful water supply, but Mazandaran is itself now struggling with a water shortage.
Speaking at the 18th National Rice Conference on Monday, Director General Mohammad-Reza Razavi said the provinces struggling with the most severe drought, including Fars and Khuzestan provinces, have compounded their problem by increasing the amount of cultivated land by 50 percent, meaning there is less water to irrigate more land.
Razavi said the shortages have spurred migration to the Mazandaran province,"but, Mazandaran is also threatened by a shortage of water,” adding that droughts have led to a 30 percent drop in precipitation in Mazandaran each year.
​ Increasingly severe droughts, a dramatic drop in precipitation caused by climate change, and years of government mismanagement of water resources has made life increasingly difficult for farmers and others living in the provinces, and is one of the issues driving civil unrest in the country over the last year.
Iran is increasingly vulnerable to climate change, experts say.
Rainfall in the Middle East is expected to fall 20 percent by the end of the century, and temperatures could rise by as much as 5 degrees Celsius, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"A severe drought, mismanaged water resources, and dust storms diminished Iran’s economy in recent years, according to experts who study the region.
While the protests are largely driven by resistance to the country’s hardline conservative government, such environmental factors might have contributed to the largest protests inside Iran in years" Scientific American reported last January amid massive demonstrations in at least a dozen cities in Iran.
"The drought has certainly impacted Iran’s economy broadly, and it’s impacted the quality of life and living and migration patterns around Iran quite considerably," Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Energy Security and Climate Initiative told Scientific American.
"It’s an issue of huge political importance, one that factored into the presidential election last year, so it’s certainly something I think one can say has had a role in shaping frustrations and driving some of the underlying grievances around the protests," Maloney said.

Producers in central west NSW will experience a tough couple of decades of dry conditions, with a report revealing severe droughts are expected to become more frequent.
Climate change is making drought worse, Climate Councillor Professor Will Steffen said.
“With the momentum of past emissions we can’t stop these trends, they’ll continue for a couple of decades.
So you’re looking at continuing drier than normal conditions in southern Australia out to about 2040 or so,” Professor Steffen said.
In the central west, 85 per cent of the region was in drought, while 7 per cent was in intense drought and 8 per cent was drought affected.
The report found transitioning electricity systems to renewable energy sources like wind and solar, which have minimal water requirements, can reduce overall water consumption, as well as reducing the risks to electricity generation associated with droughts, heatwaves and flooding.
“So you have a double whammy there, that you’ve got a long term effect of climate change making droughts worse and when you do get the natural variability like an El Nino that just makes it even worse.. the immediate prognosis over the next six months is not very good.” Professor Steffen said farmers need to be aware that it is likely Australia will have dry conditions over the next several months.
Across the Murray-Darling Basin, streamflows have declined by 41 percent since the mid-1990s, the report found.
“We’ve been saying this in the scientific community for quite a while now that there are huge risks with climate change,” he said.
“People don’t understand that we rely on a reasonably steady climate.

Climate change is impacting the Caribbean, with millions facing increasing food insecurity and decreasing freshwater availability as droughts become more likely across the region, according to new Cornell research in Geophysical Research Letters.
“Climate change – where mean temperatures rise – has already affected drought risk in the Caribbean.
Since 1950, the Caribbean region has seen a drying trend and scattered multiyear droughts.
But the recent Pan-Caribbean drought in 2013-16 was unusually severe and placed 2 million people in danger of food insecurity.
In Haiti, for example, over half the crops were lost in 2015 due to drought, which pushed about 1 million people into food insecurity, while an additional 1 million people suffered food shortages throughout the region, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs.
Examining climatological data from the 2013-16 Pan-Caribbean drought, anthropogenic warming accounted for a 15 to 17 percent boost of the drought’s severity, Herrera said.
Climate model simulations indicate the most significant decrease in precipitation in the Caribbean might occur May through August – the rainy season.
A failed rainy season in spring and summer, added to a normal dry season in the late fall and winter, prolongs a drought.
Park Williams, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University.
The research was supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Science Foundation and NASA.

It is anticipated to have an increasing impact on human health, security, livelihoods, and poverty levels in Asia and the Pacific.
Food productivity and human security is projected to decline in many Asian countries.
Both climatic and non-climatic drivers are affecting the extreme vulnerability of the Pacific region.
So, it was timely and appropriate that the United Nations Environment Programme-Asia-Pacific Adaptation Network (UNEP-APAN) organized the Climate Change Adaptation Forum for the sixth time in Manila recently to discuss ways to make the world a better and safer place to live in.
The three-day event was co-hosted by the Climate Change Commission, Philippines, the Government of the Republic of Palau, and the Asian Development Bank.
Since the impact of climate change affect the poor and the marginalized the most, the participants felt that the damages, threats and vulnerability of such calamities should be shared by all.
Mr Anand Patwardhan, Director General of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, in his keynote address delivered from Stockholm exhorted countries to share knowledge on adaptation with other nations for the benefit of others.
While glancing through the newspapers, I found two articles on climate change published in them — one on a new “Hyper alarming” study showing massive insect loss even in protected natural reserves and the other on Pasig River winning the first Asia River Prize award.
According to the study, there is dramatic decline in invertebrate populations.
The study also found that the number of insect-eating frogs has also decreased.

Researchers mapped the areas where future global conflict is most likely to break out as a result of climate change-fueled water shortages.
Researchers said the areas most likely to be hit by ‘hydro-political’ issues are those with already stressed water basins.
They believe water-related conflict or cooperation is likely to develop in the next 50 to 100 years as a result of climate change and population growth.
‘Competition over limited water resources is one of the main concerns for the coming decades,’ the scientists explained.
First, we wanted to highlight the factors which lead to either political cooperation or tensions in transboundary river basins,’ Fabio Farinosi, the lead author of the study, said in a statement.
‘And second, we wanted to map and monitor the likelihood of these kinds of interactions over space and time and under changing socio-economic conditions.’
They then studied the links with freshwater ability, climate stress, human pressure on water resources and socio-economic conditions.
Researchers identified five primary hotspots, including the Nile, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Tigris-Euphrates and Colorado rivers – all of which are areas with ‘already water stressed basins.’
However, not every hotspot for water scarcity will be rife with conflict.
According to the landmark report from the International Panel on Climate Change, we will need to close down hundreds of coal-fired power stations and rapidly switch to using renewable energy.

Thanks to climate change, California’s fires will only continue to get worse in the coming years, according to California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment, released Monday by the Golden State governor’s office.
California wildfires, including the Mendocino Complex Fire and Carr Fire, have broken records in 2018.
California’s weather woes will not be limited to wildfire destruction.
Exacerbated conditions already starting to show up across the state, such as sea level rise eroding beaches and impacting public shoreline access, as well as critical water shortages and major droughts plaguing Central Valley farms, will worsen as global warming becomes more severe.
If greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, a number of trends may worsen significantly by the year 2100.
Average daily temperates are projected to rise as much as 5.6 to 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit.
And by 2050, drinking water supplied by mountain ice pack is anticipated to decrease by two-thirds.
The Trump administration has been criticized for environmental and emissions policy deregulation that worries scientists already observing the impacts of climate change on weather patterns and natural disasters like mega-fires and years-long droughts.
California governor Jerry Brown took direct aim at President Trump in his prepared statements about the report via Twitter.
“In California, facts and science still matter,” Brown wrote.

This is a modal window.
No compatible source was found for this media.
As global climate change produces more extreme and unpredictable weather, water scarcity is a looming threat for many nations.
Australia’s state and federal governments have poured $430m dollars of emergency aid into NSW, which accounts for around a quarter of the country’s agricultural output, the BBC reported.
It’s just depressing.” More than half of Queensland is also in drought, as are parts of Victoria and South Australia states.
A shortage of feed is forcing farmers to sell their livestock, or risk them starving.
The dry weather is expected to continue over the coming months.
This weekend, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Australia had become “a land of drought.” Though drought is caused by a variety of factors, climate change can affect a variety of these factors.
In June, Turnbull said, “I don’t know many people in rural New South Wales that… don’t think the climate is getting drier and rainfall is becoming more volatile.” Much of the world has experienced extreme weather this year, such as heat waves, forest fires, drought and flooding.
Much of Europe and North America is currently battling through an unseasonably warm summer, which has produced record temperatures and rampant forest fires.

In fact, it’s been raining for days.
I’ve been closely following coverage of the drought in my home state.
It’s time we sit, talk and learn about it.
“Climate change is altering fundamental weather patterns — affecting temperatures, water availability, and weather extremes — that shape the lives of New Mexicans,” the Union of Concerned Scientists reported in 2016.
Climate change affects us all, but some more than others.
Those most affected by droughts and climate change are disproportionately people of color — like my people, the Jemez Pueblo community of New Mexico.
A report by the Poor People’s Campaign and the Institute for Policy Studies found that poor people spend seven times as much on water as wealthy households.
And 13 of the 20 most water-poor counties in the U.S. were majority-Native.
How are my people the most affected?
Our irrigation systems are on the brink of becoming obsolete — and with it the food sovereignty we’ve cultivated for generations.

In the summer, Cape Town came within weeks of becoming the world’s first major modern city to run out of water.
Only severe water-saving measures have so far averted Day Zero.
New research from C40 Cities and the Global Covenant of Mayors estimates that by 2050, over 650 million urban residents – equivalent to twice the population of the US – will be vulnerable to drought.
The same report, “The Future We Don’t Want – How Climate Change Could Impact the World’s Greatest Cities”, forecasts that extremely high summer temperatures will become the norm for more than 1.6 billion people, pushing to the limit the water supplies that we all rely on.
As mayor of Cape Town, I am committed to facing the challenges of climate change with courage and determination.
By repairing water infrastructure, driving innovation in the way we value and use water, and mobilising communities to ensure our collective water security, we can create resilient, sustainable and liveable cities around the world.
That is why, as a leading member of C40 Cities and the Global Covenant of Mayors, I am committed to bold climate action that benefits all citizens.
Together, we must learn to do more with less, and support citizens to make the most of the resources we have available.
As mayor, I have no greater responsibility than to protect the health, prosperity and welfare of citizens today and for generations to come.
** “The Future We Don’t Want – How Climate Change Could Impact the World’s Greatest Cities” was produced in partnership by C40, Global Covenant of Mayors, the Urban Climate Change Research Network and Acclimatise.