Impact of climate changes on food safety related issues in the case of Romania

Abstract

Climate change and economic development have both an increasing impact on human health and on the quality of life. The reverse assumption is also true, since, for improving economic and social development and well-being, the human activity is affecting the environment. This paper presents some of the alarm signals of various international institutions and entities regarding several challenges the current modern society is facing: climate change, disruptive weather events, food safety implications, health related issues, economic losses. Based on previous studies which demonstrated a direct connection between climate changes and weather conditions and the outbreak of infectious diseases and threats for the food safety chain, the main research objective is to determine whether this hypothesis is also valid in the case of Romania. Thus, the conducted analysis takes into consideration variations of temperature and precipitation in relation to new cases of food-borne diseases in order to determine if this connection is statistically significant as it was in other regions of Europe and of the world previously examined by scholars.

Keywords

• climate change
• food safety
• food-borne diseases
• economic costs