Op ed on Skol, September 21, 2018
By Josh Karliner – Health Care Without Harm
On 12 September 2018, GCHA co-hosted the Global Climate and Health Forum, alongside the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco.
It’s been a momentous month. A massive hurricane stormed across the Atlantic Ocean. A super typhoon simultaneously traversed the Pacific. Both wreaked havoc—displacing more than a million people and destroying lives as they slammed into land in the U.S., the Philippines and China. Meanwhile, deep flood waters finally receded in Southern India leaving another a million people displaced in their wake. Wildfires continued to burn up and down the state of California and across the West, scarring land and communities alike.
As scientists have predicted for decades, climate change is beginning to rear its ugly head almost everywhere, at almost every turn, almost every day, impacting human health, the economy and the very fabric of our societies.
With this backdrop of growing planetary havoc, the UN Secretary General took the stage in New York this month to warn that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity and that we risk passing a “point of no return.”
Continue reading: Health care in the house at the Global Climate Action Summit