Το work with title Assessing the impacts of the climate crisis on health, the natural and built environment by Papagou Maria is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Bibliographic Citation
Maria Papagou, "Assessing the impacts of the climate crisis on health, the natural and built environment", Diploma Work, School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2024
https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.101180
The climate crisis is emerging as one of the most severe and urgent threats faced by humanity and the environment, referring to the changes induced in the balance of nature, particularly due to human activities. The rise in average atmospheric temperatures, more intense extreme weather events such as storms, prolonged heatwaves, droughts, and floods are some of the impacts of the climate crisis. These impacts cause a range of profound and sometimes irreversible damage to ecosystems and the well-being and health of people.The purpose of this thesis is to identify and evaluate the impacts of the climate crisis in areas such as the environment, health, and the economy. The study focuses on the Mediterranean region, which is particularly affected by global warming and climate change. The research was conducted using the Operational Risk Management (ORM) method in three steps: identifying impacts through literature review, assessing them from four categories of stakeholders (public sector, research and academic sector, non-governmental organizations or citizen groups, and private sector) through a questionnaire, and finally ranking the impacts based on Risk Assessment Codes (RACs).The selected stakeholders identified floods, fires, ecosystem destruction, drought, and heatwaves as the most serious risks of the climate crisis. The risks were categorized according to their effects on humans, the natural environment, and the built environment. For humans and the natural environment, fires were highlighted as the most severe impact, while for the built environment, the economic crisis was considered the most critical.The most severe impacts were also classified by stakeholder category to understand their priorities and concerns regarding the climate crisis. This allows each expert to take action in areas within their jurisdiction by implementing targeted measures for the mitigation and effective management of climate crisis risks.