Thanks for your question. Yes, air pollution (also called poor air quality) can make you sick, both physically and emotionally.

Air pollution is made up of very small particles. You can’t see each particle, but together they make a haze. You can sometimes smell air pollution, especially if it comes from bushfire smoke.

When you breathe these particles in, they can affect many systems in your body, especially your lungs and your heart. For example, if you have asthma, you might find poor air quality will make you feel wheezy or trigger an asthma attack. So it’s important to have your asthma medication with you on a smoky day.

When there is a lot of smoke in the air, some people can feel very nervous and anxious. If they have experienced a bushfire before, smelling or seeing smoke can trigger emotions or memories related to the previous fire.

Air pollution can come from burning wood (such as in a wood heater or a bushfire), burning coal or from petrol or diesel cars. Reducing these sources will help us all breathe easier.

Climate change can impact human health in many ways. In fact, many doctors think that climate change is a health emergency, more than an environmental emergency. Climate change will lead to more extreme weather events, like heatwaves, bushfires, floods and severe storms, and these all have the potential to take lives. Smoke from bushfires is also a problem as it can travel a long way and cause people to be sick when they are nowhere near the fire.  

Climate change can also cause problems for farming, where it might be too hot or too dry for crops to grow. That places pressure on farmers to produce enough healthy food, like fruits and vegetables. This can cause prices of these foods to increase, meaning people that have less money are unable to buy healthy food, which can increase their chances of getting sick. If food is scarce because of repeated drought, then this can lead to mass migration and economic or political instability. Climate change is also causing some insects, like mosquitoes, to move to places where they previously didn’t live. This is causing diseases like malaria, dengue and Ross River virus to spread. These sorts of impacts will be felt by some people more than others. People that are poor, live further away from health care, or people who make a living from agriculture will feel the effects first. But these people aren’t usually the ones that make decisions about society.  

Humans are very clever and will make lots of changes to adapt to these new conditions. However, it is always better (and cheaper) to prevent these conditions from happening in the first place. This is called mitigation. We still have time to mitigate climate change by switching to renewable energy, consuming less and using our cars less, but we need to be doing a lot more than we are, a lot quicker than we are. The video below from the World Health Organisation talks about some of the ways human health is affected by climate change.

That’s a big question! I’ll concentrate on air pollution, as this is linked to climate change. Air pollution is made up of lots of chemicals, some of which are harmful to us. The amount of these chemicals in the air (called the concentration) is the most important thing, as we are more concerned when there are higher levels of the chemicals that make us sick. The ones that are most common and harmful to people are particulate matter, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide. These chemicals come from many places, including cars, factories, bushfires and even wood heaters.  

In Tasmania, we have some of the cleanest air in the world, because we don’t have huge cities with lots of cars and factories. Lucky us! But we still get air pollution in the form of smoke from wood heaters and from bushfires. Although smoke is made up of many chemicals, the main we know about and can make you sick, is called particulate matter. These are very tiny particles, only about 3% of the diameter of a human hair. When there are many of these particles in the air, you can smell smoke and the air will be hazy. These particles often irritate your eyes and nose and you might get a headache. Some people can become very sick if they breathe in these particles, especially people with asthma. The more of these types of particles you breathe, the more chances you have of getting sick.  

You would have heard about carbon dioxide as one of the main chemicals that contribute to climate change. Some people say that carbon dioxide isn’t really an air pollutant, as we need a certain level to maintain life on earth (in fact, our bodies make carbon dioxide as part of our normal function, so we always have some in our system). But too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is really the problem with climate change, as it keeps the earth too warm. So you could call it a pollutant in large concentrations. This is why it’s important to keep track of this chemical in the atmosphere.  

Great question! And the answer is yes, climate change can cause sickness in lots of ways. Illness from extreme heat, bushfires and bushfire smoke, and the spread of diseases like malaria are all linked to climate change. One of the biggest risks to athletes is having to play or train in extreme heat. As you probably know, climate change is making extreme heat events (or heatwaves) longer and more common. So it’s becoming more likely that most athletes will need to play or train in these sorts of conditions, especially sports that are normally played outside and over summer (like athletics, tennis or cricket).  

Exercising when its really hot can potentially make you very sick. Your body needs to stay within a certain temperature range (36.1°C-37.2°C) to operate effectively, and we have lots of mechanisms to make that happen (like sweating, for example). If the conditions we are training or playing in mean our body is unable to stay within that range, then we can get a heat-related illness. This can be mild, like a headache or feeling dizzy, and if we cool down, then our body can keep doing what it was doing before. However, if we can’t cool down adequately, then it becomes a problem. This is called heat stroke and it’s a very serious and life-threatening condition. If you want to see what this looks like, watch this clip of Scottish marathon runner Callum Hawkins competing in the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast. It’s a reminder that when we are training or competing in a hotter environment that usual, we need to take time for our body to get used to the new conditions. This is called acclimatising. 

Another impact of climate change is the increased risk of bushfires. These can generate a lot of smoke, and the smoke can travel a long way. We saw that in the Black Summer fires in 2019-20, when smoke from those fires travelled right around the world (watch this amazing clip from NASA!). If athletes are training or playing when the smoke levels are high, this can also make them sick. Its not good for your body to breathe in lots of smoke, especially when you are breathing hard, like when you are playing sport.