October 21, 2018, op-ed by Tim K. Takaro and Jennifer Miller for CBC in Canada
After a summer that saw over 90 heat-related deaths in Quebec, drought-impacted crops across the Prairies, and large swaths of Western Canada and Ontario ravaged by wildfires and shrouded in smoke, many of the world’s leading experts gathered in San Francisco last month at the Global Climate and Health Forum to discuss the health implications of climate change.
The call to action we issued is clear: “Climate change is a global health emergency.”
The World Health Organization calls climate change the “greatest threat to global health in the 21st century” but the call to action points out that many of the policies that move us toward our climate goals have demonstrable and significant health benefits. That’s good news.
Unfortunately, we are failing to capitalize on the health opportunities of climate action