Climate Change as a Threat to Global Health. The Perspective of the WHO

The World Health Organization (WHO. Climate Change. 2023. https://www.who.int/health-topics/climate-change .) claims that global warming is contributing to more intense and frequent heatwaves, leading to health problems such as heat-related illnesses and the exacerbation of pre-existing conditions such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), have also been linked to climate change. Mitigating and adapting measures to climate change are considered crucial to safeguard public health (Abbas et al. Abbas, Ansar, Dian Ekowati, Fendy Suhariadi, and Rakotoarisoa Maminirina Fenitra. 2022. Health Implications, Leaders Societies, and Climate Change: A Global Review. In Ecological Footprints of Climate Change : Adaptive Approaches and Sustainability, ed. Uday Chatterjee, Angela Oyilieze Akanwa, Suresh Kumar, Sudhir Kumar Singh, and Abira Dutta Roy, 653–75. Springer Climate. Cham: Springer International Publishing. 10.1007/978-3-031-15501-7_26). In other words, it could be fruitful to view the intersecting challenges of planetary and human health through a polycrisis lens, which advocates for polysolutions (Henig and Knight Henig, David, and Knight, Daniel M. 2023. Polycrisis: Prompts for an Emerging Worldview. Anthropology Today, 39: 3–6. 10.1111/1467-8322.12793) that redress the interconnectedness of these domains. As O’Regan (O'Regan, Michael (ed). 2023. Off the Grid and on the Road in Europe: Living in an Age of Uncertainty and Polycrisis. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures Special issue 32 (2023). https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ajec/32/2/ajec.32.issue-2.xml ) reminds us, though, polycrisis is not experienced in the same way by every individual. Consequently, organisations like the WHO, whose role is to raise awareness about climate change, need to tailor their communications to different audiences whose experiences of polycrisis differ. This study examines how the WHO communicates the health impacts of climate change to different audiences. Using corpus linguistics and artificial intelligence, in particular generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) from the MedAlpaca collection (Han et al. in MedAlpaca—An Open-Source Collection of Medical Conversational AI Models and Training Data, 2023a.) trained on medical data, and drawing on CDA, the study analyses the WHO's regional Web platforms, to identify the medical discourse in the context of the regional climate debate and to assess its significance. In addition, a multimodal analysis using Scikit-learn (Hackeling, Gavin in Mastering Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn—Second Edition. Packt, 2017. https://www.packtpub.com/product/mastering-machine-learning-with-scikit-learn-second-edition/9781788299879 ) will identify image similarities and show how images support health communication goals. The study aims to demonstrate how climate change discourse adapts to different audiences in different regions to promote proactive policymaking, raise awareness, and encourage collective action: in Stibbe’s (Stibbe, Critical Discourse Studies 11:117–128, 2014) words, a cluster of linguistic and multimodal features are used to convey a particular worldview.