A few weeks before the 2016 election, the researchers at Stanford University presented the report to the two presidential transition teams. Titled “Health: The Human Face of Climate Change, Perspective and Recommendations for the Next U.S. President,” the report recommended that a future administration initiate a formal, decade–long emergency response to climate change, managed by the U.S. State Department, and frame climate change as a global health security issue — in other words, an acute public health threat to populations across the globe. “The Human Face of Climate Change” report was one of a series of 14 climate reports that came out of a 2016 conference at Stanford titled “Setting the Climate Agenda for the Next U.S. President.”

One of the report’s three authors, Katherine Burke, MM, MSc, who is deputy director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford, said that when she and her co–authors set out to write the report, they believed it was an extraordinary opportunity to make an impact. Her co–authors are Michele Barry, MD, a Stanford professor of medicine and director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health; and Diana Chapman Walsh, PhD, senior adviser to the center and president emerita of Wellesley College.

Although the report has received no response from President Trump or his administration, the advice it contains still provides a valuable framework for tackling climate change and health, said Walsh.

Experts agree that the Earth is warming dangerously and that this warming is due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities. The damage in ecosystem disruptions, rising sea levels and ever–more intense storms are all well–documented. So, increasingly, are the rapidly changing climate’s effects on human health.

Both greater average temperature and searing heat waves have immediate effects on morbidity and mortality through heat–related illnesses such as heat stroke and heat exhaustion. “The single thing that’s clearest is the impact of rising ambient temperature,” said Mark Cullen, MD, professor of medicine and of biomedical data science “With every degree centigrade rise in summer high temperatures, there’s a predictable increase in total mortality.”

In addition, healthy people who normally work outdoors during the heat of the day can be sickened or even killed by extreme heat. Farm workers, road workers and roofers are among those at risk. In a warmer world, the number of days when it’s too hot to safely work outside are expected to increase dramatically. Places like Texas, which once had 10 to 20 days a year of temperatures greater than 100 degrees, might see more than 100 a year by the end of the century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Infectious disease will also get worse, as disease vectors such as mosquitoes and ticks grow in numbers and spread. And climate change has hundreds of other indirect effects on health. For example, our cattle and chickens are as vulnerable as we are to 100–plus–degree temperatures that increasingly persist for days or weeks.

Ocean warming and acidification are together killing coral reefs and collapsing marine fisheries, the primary food for some 2 billion people in Asia and the Pacific.

The consequences of shattered food supplies spread outward, causing economic privation, social upheaval, food shortages and the displacement and forced migration of millions. These in turn lead to violence, trauma and physical and mental health disability.

For example, an extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 — which experts believe was due to climate change – caused massive crop failures, which, in turn, triggered the migration of 1.5 million people from farms to cities.