**Abstract**

The study examined the impact of climate change on public health provisioning in Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to recognising the multifarious influence of climate change on health, it argues that the quest for global health security can only be achieved against the backdrop of concerted mainstreaming of climate change response into public heath provisioning, especially in the developing world. Adapting to climate change and mitigating its impact would logically require integrating it into public health planning, programming and interventions. Therefore, if health security entails provisioning and catering to the full range of health needs of people, climate change given its undoubted implications for health should be in the forefront of health security globally. Despite the global discourse of climate change and health security, tangible actions and programmes at different levels are needed to achieve the goals of good health and effective health security. This is no less the case now that the pandemic has challenged and stretched health institutions and provisions. However, the complex and intertwining effects of climate change and its manifold nexus with public health and health security can easily be apprehended through the systems perspective. There is the need for both radicalization of the public health system in Sub-Saharan Africa and concerted efforts across disciplines and actors to achieve effective climate change mitigation and adaptation and thus further strengthen health security.

**Keywords:** Climate Change, Sub-Saharan Africa, Public Health, Health Security, Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation, Pandemic

#### **1. Introduction**

The chapter examines the impact and influence of climate change on public health in Sub-Saharan Africa which is a developing region of the world. It contends that in addition to its noted impact on agriculture, the environment, economy and migration, climate change also exerts far-reaching consequences on people's health and occupies a prominent position in any serious discourse on health security. As a result, adapting to climate change and mitigating its impact would logically require its mainstreaming into public health planning, programming and interventions especially in developing parts of the world where public institutions and structures are in most cases incapacitated. In other words, there is no doubting the nexus between climate change and health as well as the various deleterious impacts of climate change on public health [1–3] and health security.

There is no gainsaying the fact that health security entails provisioning and catering to the full health needs of the people in a fair and equitable manner especially against acute health issues that may have global origin and ramifications. In other words, such global events as climate change and pandemics are the main thrust of health security provisioning. Health security thus involves buffering citizens against the present and future threats and impacts of such global events. As argued here, one critical strategy for achieving this goal may be through mainstreaming climate change into public health provision.

Therefore, responding to the new challenges of climate change is certainly a critical way of ensuring health security now and in the foreseeable future. The reassurance that climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies embody provisions for health goes a long way in ensuring health security. Without doubt, building health security niches on the well-known or orthodox health challenges including the explosive issue of COVID-19 pandemic without taking adequate cognisance of climate change is surely deepening health insecurity inadvertently. Therefore, the focus on climate change and public health should be seen as part and parcel of the broad agenda of ensuring health security especially in developing nations where weak institutions and other structural constraints may undermine even the best health intentions.

Be the above as it may, the extant literature is replete with narratives on how climate change affects natural disaster including health related risks for different categories of the human population globally [4–7]. In other words, climate change impacts on natural disaster which in turn leads to fatalities, injuries and other shortterm and long-term health issues for affected members of the population.

While some of what passes as climate change may be attributable to changes and transformations in the natural system overtime, a significant contributor to climate change results directly or indirectly from human actions and obtuse inaction. In other words, human influence or activities have been the dominant force of climate change especially the easily observable phenomenon of global warming [8].

There is no doubt that climate change and other human induced stressors negatively influence human health and well-being in various ways. While some of these threats are apparently obvious others are directly observable. However, the impact of climate change and adverse weather events on health is gradually becoming an accepted phenomenon which challenges health policy and planning especially in the areas of public and community health. Thus, while climate change as a distinct phenomenon poses its various challenges there is need for public planners to incorporate climate change issues into the mainframe of health planning. In other words, while climate change calls for adaptation and mitigation efforts, such efforts should be extended and mainstreamed into public health planning especially in the developing parts of the world where public health infrastructure may be commonly weak and bedevilled by structural constraints of different types; which also have a sum negative impact on efforts towards health security whether conceived from a global or national perspective.

Health security even though mainly apprehended from a global perspective equally entails well-planned and systematic action at national and regional levels to deal with global health threatening events. Without doubt, environmental degradation and the increasing consequences of climate change are global concerns that threaten health and which demand concerted action at different levels.

However, assessing the impact of climate change on health, health security and other spheres of national life would benefit from the realization that climate change is not really a single driver of repercussions but is in reality mediated by exiting contextual factors or forces in producing adverse impacts on human life [9]. It is in this regard that climate change response should be context-specific

and targeted at the observed and expected adverse impacts of climate change in any given world region.
