By Conrad Mwanawashe
For decades, Southern Africa’s climate crisis looked like a withered maize stalk. We measured the damage in tonnes of grain lost and Kariba’s dropping water levels.
But Mweetwa Mudenda of Lusaka Apex Medical University argues that the frontline has moved. The damage is no longer just in the fields; it is in our blood, lungs, and immune systems.
Mudenda’s assessment is blunt: 3.6 billion people live in climate-vulnerable zones, and for Zimbabwe and its neighbours, this is not a future forecast—it is the current reality.
There is a collision between rising temperatures and strained health defenses.
“Climate change is a current public health emergency, driving heat stress, food and water insecurity, and climate-sensitive infectious diseases.,” said Mudenda while addressing a Cross Border Media, Science Café on how climate change affects global (and local) health.
Civil society advocates now classify this not as an environmental issue, but as a Global Public Health Emergency.
The New Map of Disease
The most immediate threat is the migration of sickness. As temperatures climb, the high-altitude “safety zones” that once protected parts of Zimbabwe and Zambia from mosquitoes are vanishing.
Climate change reshapes disease distribution, extends transmission, and challenges public health systems.
For malaria control programs, this threatens to erase decades of gains. It also invites new enemies: warmer, wetter conditions are rolling out the red carpet for Dengue fever in regions where it was previously unknown.
The Heat and the Virus
Beyond the mosquito, the heat itself kills. The region has recorded a 23% rise in heat-related mortality since the 1990s. This thermal stress hits the elderly hard, but in Sub-Saharan Africa, it strikes a unique and deadly blow at the intersection of climate and chronic care.
Harry Simuntala’s analysis exposes a critical vulnerability: the link between extreme weather and HIV. In a region carrying a heavy HIV burden, climate shocks are dismantling Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR). When floods wash away bridges in rural districts, ARV supply chains snap.
When droughts kill the harvest, food insecurity spikes, forcing women and girls into transactional sex to survive. For a patient in a remote village, a cyclone isn’t just weather—it is a direct assault on their viral suppression.
Simuntala said “climate change is now a health emergency”. He highlighted the following key findings:
- Heat-related deaths: +23% since 1990s (546,000/year).
- Wildfire deaths: 154,000 (2024).
- Vector-borne diseases: +49% transmission.
- Africa: +14.5 million projected deaths by 2050.
- Vulnerable groups: 15× higher death rates from extreme weather.
Building Fortresses, Not Just Clinics
The African CSO Climate & Health Demands say that the environment and the hospital are the same battleground. With projections warning of 14.5 million additional climate-related deaths in Africa by 2050, buying carbon credits is not a health strategy.
It requires what the COP 30 discussions termed “climate-resilient health systems.” It demands clinics that can withstand floods, supply chains that are disaster-proof, and a recognition that in Sub-Saharan Africa, climate justice is synonymous with health justice. The fever is rising, and the region’s health systems must adapt before the temperature becomes unmanageable.