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The GCHA blog features posts by GCHA members and our team and offers opinions and insights into recent climate and health related ongoings and discussions.
Climate Medicine will constitute the cornerstone for the practice of Medicine in the 21st century
The 2018 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change stated that “climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”. In 2019, the world’s leading medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, provided readers with “a...
Healthy people need a healthy planet
The climate crisis is the greatest health threat of the 21st century and threatens not only biodiversity but also our health. For a long time, this threat has remained abstract - partly because of the way we have been communicating and highlighting the severe impacts...
The Escazu Agreement: How the idea of a “healthy environment” became a stumbling block
The Escazu Agreement, the first treaty on protection of the environment in South America and the Carribean, and the world’s first to include protections for environmental human rights defenders, has been rejected as “inconvenient” by the Chilean government of Sebastian Piñera, which declined to ratify it on September 22, 2020.
If air pollution is “the new tobacco”, what lessons have we learned to solve this burning problem?
- by Nina Renshaw, Director of Policy and Advocacy at NCD Alliance (GCHA member) - We are less than a month away until countries meet in Madrid, Spain at the Climate Conference to decide on climate action to keep us at 1.5 C. Climate change was also the first topic...
Chile withdraws from hosting COP25 – but climate, health, and social equity action cannot pause
- by Jeni Miller - On 30 October, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera announced that Chile would be unable to host December’s UN climate negotiations, due to current civil unrest in the country. Members of leading health and development organizations from around the...
UN Climate Summit & Global Climate Strike: Rising to the climate challenge, an urgent health issue
- by Jeni Miller - On September 23, the head of the United Nations, Secretary-General António Guterres, will host a UN Climate Action Summit in New York. “Our overarching goal is to raise ambition and get the world on track to limit global temperature rise to no more...
Connecting the dots between health and climate: a call to action for UNGA 2019
- by Rachel Thomson, Policy Fellow at World Obesity Federation (GCHA member) - The interconnections between climate and human health are now widely recognised: by scientists, by policymakers and by communities experiencing the effects of...
Our House is on Fire
- by Frances MacGuire - A search for the Amazon on Google will throw up more than a dozen air pollution monitors for sale. This is surprising because, of all the thousands of words that have been written about the Amazon forest fires since mid-August, very few have...
IPCC Report: Our food system is at risk and doing harm — transforming it is essential for health and climate
In public health, we’ve known for years that our current food system isn’t healthy for people, and that there are ways to make it better. What the IPCC Lands report makes clear is that it’s also not healthy for our climate or the land on which we depend. Transforming how we approach food offers a win-win, for human health, for ecosystems, for a stable climate, but we must act now.