Society has 10 years to tackle climate change or humanity could lose 50 years of progress in global health, a major new report claims.
However the study also
said that tackling global warming provides society with the
greatest opportunity to improve people’s health in this
century.
Academics at University College London (UCL) and the University
of Cambridge said the impact of climate change on human health
has been underestimated in a report published Monday.
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The study calls on governments to phase out coal power plants,
improve pedestrian and cycling infrastructure in cities, promote
greener lifestyles and insulate more buildings to cut energy use
and prevent cold-related deaths and disease.
Professor Hugh Montgomery of UCL’s Institute for Human Health and
Performance described the threat facing humanity as a
“medical emergency.”
“Climate change is a medical emergency. It thus demands and
emergency response using technologies that are available right
now,” The co-chair of the Lancet Commission, which published
the report, said.
“It’s not our grandchildren, it’s us and our children, and in
this country as well as abroad.”
The report was authored by experts from around the world and is
backed by Margaret Chan, head of the UN World Health
Organization.
Its authors identified the lack of political will to combat
climate change as the major barrier to creating a low-carbon
economy and the knock-on improvements to health and poverty which
would come about as a result.
The health impact of climate change has long been overlooked,
scientists argue.
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The report calls on doctors and health professionals to take a
leading role in ending society’s “addiction” to fossil
fuels, confronting “powerful entrenched interests” in
the same way health experts took on the tobacco industry in the
past.
Direct risks to health include heatwaves, floods and droughts,
while indirect and equally deadly risks include air pollution,
diseases, famines and mental illness.
The rapid closure of coal-fired plants around the world is one of
the report’s top recommendations for preventing deaths from air
pollution.
“We see climate change as a major health issue and that it is
often neglected in the policy debates,” co-chair of the
commission Professor Anthony Costello said.
“On our current trajectory, going to 4 [degrees] C [of
warming] is somewhere we don’t want to go and that has very
serious and potentially catastrophic effects for human health and
human survival and could undermine all of the last half-century’s
gains.”
“We see that as a medical emergency because the action we
need to do to stop that in its tracks and get us back onto a 2C
trajectory or less requires action now – and action in the next
ten years – otherwise the game could be over,” the director
of UCL’s Institute of Global Health added.
The report follows a rare encyclical from Pope Francis published
last week, in which he argued a moral case for addressing climate
change and poverty.
It also comes after a May report by the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) which found fossil fuel companies receive $5.3trillion
(£3.4trillion) of global government subsidies a year, equivalent
to $10 a minute.