Search

The Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material has published a range of resources that promote environmentally aware collection care and management practices including climate-specific Environmental Guidelines, the Sustainable Collections wiki and the Climate Adaptation resource. The Climate Adaptation resource provides access to 180 maps illustrating potential future climate scenarios for Australia in 2030 and 2090, using the two Representative Concentration Pathways RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. These maps were produced as part of research undertaken in 2019–2020 by Pagliarino and Meredith and supplement those published in volume 41 (issue 1) of the AICCM Bulletin. The release of updated climate change projections in the Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis – precipitated a review of the Climate Adaptation resource to confirm the continued veracity of the maps. This paper provides the results of that assessment, which confirmed the resource's ongoing accuracy and currency. In addition, the paper includes discussion of the new IPCC future climate scenarios of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, which supersede RCP, and a summary of the state of the climate in Australia with warming, humidity, fire, weather and sea level rise investigated in more detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite many studies on the effects of heat on mental health, few studies have examined humidity. In order to investigate the relationship among heat, humidity and mental health, we matched data from the Social, Economic and Environmental Factors (SEEF) project with gridded daily temperature and water vapour pressure data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Logit models were employed to describe the associations among heat (assessed using temperature, °C), humidity (assessed using vapour pressure, hPa) and two measures of mental health, (i) high or very high distress (assessed using K10 scores ≥ 22) and (ii) having been treated for depression or anxiety. We found a one-unit increase in temperature and vapour pressure was associated with an increase in the occurrence of high or very high distress by 0.2% (p < 0.001, 99% CI: 0.1–0.3%) and 0.1% (p < 0.001, 99% CI: 0.0–0.3%) respectively. However, when humidity rose to the 99th percentile of the sample, the estimated marginal effect of heat was more than doubled (0.5%, p < 0.001, 99% CI: 0.2–0.7%). Neither heat nor humidity was related to having been treated for depression or anxiety in the last month. Humidity compounds the negative association between hot weather and mental health and thus should be taken into account when reforming the health care system to respond to the challenge of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]