The Health Ministry is preparing for a possible rise in climate-related illness as the El Niño phenomenon shifts Sri Lanka’s weather towards higher-than-normal rainfall followed by a dry spell.
Dr. Inoka Suraweera, a Consultant Community Physician in the ministry’s environmental and occupational health division, said health authorities were in regular contact with the Meteorology Department and the Disaster Management Centre on how conditions were developing, she told the Daily Mirror.
Public awareness work on heat-related illness through the media has begun as a first step. Beyond that, the ministry is running capacity-building programmes for health workers, particularly clinicians at divisional level.
“On top of that, we are carrying out capacity-building programmes for health workers, particularly clinicians at the divisional level, regarding heat-related diseases. Actually, we are on board,” she said.
On the rainfall expected to follow, she said authorities were bracing for weather events such as floods that could in turn drive disease.
Two funded programmes
The ministry is in discussions with the Asian Development Bank to implement a National Heat Health Action Plan through grant assistance.
A second programme, “Heat and Workers’ Health”, is to be implemented with support from the International Labour Organization. It targets people exposed to excessive heat at work, particularly agricultural and construction workers — an occupational focus that the heat-illness awareness campaigns do not by themselves cover.
The wider risk
Sri Lanka is one of only four South Asian countries where temperatures are already considered too hot for outdoor work to be done safely for an average of six hours a day, according to a recent World Bank report. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are the others.
That report, From Risk to Resilience: Helping People and Firms Adapt in South Asia, projects the figure will rise to eight or nine hours a day by 2050.
It also finds that South Asia faces a sharp increase in extreme weather, with close to 90% of the region’s population expected to be exposed to intense heat and more than one in five people at risk of severe flooding by 2030. With public budgets under strain, the report argues much of the adaptation effort will have to come from the private sector.
The preparations add a public health dimension to an El Niño event the Meteorology Department has described as the strongest in 75 years, and which has already prompted water bowser deployments and agricultural contingency planning.
No verified Sri Lankan newsroom other than the Daily Mirror had published its own report of these preparations.
