Health Must Be Part and Parcel of Climate Policy
With November’s COP26 fast approaching, this World Health Day message should inspire governments to both take responsibility and to seize the opportunity to commit to ambitious emissions reductions targets, aligned with the Paris Agreement, in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and to make health and equity a central focus of national climate policies.
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.
Chile’s newly published NDC aims for health protection through climate action, though must be made more than voluntary to be effective
In April 2020, Chile officially presented its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the United Nations (UN), updating its commitments on how it will reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the mitigation of climate change, in line with the Paris Agreement...
COVID-19 Useful Links
We have compiled a non-exhaustive list of useful links to associations and organisations providing the latest information and guidelines about the coronavirus, causing an illness called Covid-19. The virus is spreading worldwide and it is important we all follow...
Statement to Davos summit on Australian bushfires, health, climate change
On Tuesday 14 January Melbourne’s air quality was the worst in the world, interrupting the Australian Open tennis championship. Some players were unable to continue playing because of the smoke from the recent bushfires in South East Australia, which killed at least...
Royal College of Physicians to end investment in fossil fuel and mining companies
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has announced that it will divest from fossil fuel and mining companies. The RCP will start divesting from the worst oil and gas companies immediately and will divest from all fossil fuel and mining companies, whose operations are...
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
- by Jeni Miller - In 2006 I worked on a major public health initiative to reduce obesity in California, called “Healthy Eating, Active Communities”. Obesity in the US is still at epidemic levels, affecting nearly 40% of US adults according to the Centers for Disease...
Climate change threatens to undo decades’ worth of global health gains – but the health community can help to stop this
Guest opinion from Diedre Duff of GCHA member organization MedAct. Climate change is already claiming thousands of lives every year and impacting the health of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people. In 2015, the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change...