• Impacts on the social determinants of health such as secure income, safe physical environments, and access to health care and public services are impacted by sea level rise due to damaged infrastructure and transportation routes, and compromise key industries (e.g., tourism and agriculture) due to loss of land or contamination of resources. [...] The impacts of various hazards related to climate change such as heat, flooding, and the disruption to natural systems have been studied extensively, and various reports have summarized the significance of climate change to the health and well-being of Canadians.3-5 However, the specific link between sea level rise and human health, has not been widely discussed, either in national or internationa. [...] Methodology The guiding questions for the literature review were: what are the potential impacts of sea level rise on human health and who is most vulnerable to those impacts? The author searched the scholarly and grey literature for evidence that combined the concepts of human health impacts and sea level rise using the following databases and search engines: PubMed, Science direct, Medline, Ovid. [...] These hazards are of particular concern due to the uncertainty of the potential scale, types of contamination, and long-term implications of this waste being released into the environment.48,51 Exposure to chemical agents can cause a range of impacts from skin and eye irritation and headaches, to cancer, genetic mutations, and organ disease, among others.54,55 The potential health risks arising fr. [...] HEALTH RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH SEA LEVEL RISE 17 As the understanding of the linkages between sea level rise and the impacts on health becomes clearer, it is important for coastal communities exposed to risk from sea level rise to consider ways to reduce the associated health risks through adaptation and mitigation measures undertaken at the community level.
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