Joint GCHA-NCD Alliance Policy Brief published
We have just published a policy brief jointly with the NCD Alliance entitled ‘NCDs and Climate Change: Shared Opportunities for Action‘ – click on the image or here to download the English version and here for the Spanish version.
The document focuses on the opportunities for smart policy responses to several connected public health and sustainability challenges in the wake of the UN Climate Talks in Paris in 2015 and the beginning of the implementation phase of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda.
It looks at the evidence surrounding key opportunities to improve public health whilst at the same time tackling climate change. Through a synthesis of available evidence and spotlights on relevant case studies from around the world, it highlights important synergies between these agendas in the areas of energy, transport, air pollution and food and agriculture and looks at what policy steps are needed now to make these opportunities a reality.
Its key recommendations to national governments and civil society actors are:
- At global and regional levels, ensure intergovernmental, multilateral, and whole of society cooperation to address climate change and NCDs.
- At country level, integrate priorities across national strategies and action plans to achieve policy coherence.
- Scale up development aid and technical assistance for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the prevention, treatment and care for NCDs.
- Define and agree global research priorities in relation to maximising health and climate co-benefits.
- Quantify the health and related economic impacts of policy options across sectors.
We are looking forward to working more closely with the NCD Alliance in the future, to ensure that we better coordinate our efforts in working towards smarter public policy at the intersection of NCD prevention and sustainability. We have co-written a blog to mark the report’s release, looking at the relevance of climate and health co-benefits to the upcoming Habitat III conference in October, which can be read on the NCD Alliance’s website here.