“Tackling climate change in fact represents one of the greatest opportunities to benefit human health for generations to come”, according to the co-chair of the Commission on Health and Climate, Professor Anthony Costello, director University College London Institute for Global Health. The Commission, a group of scientists convened by The Lancet journal, has published its second report on 22 June 2015.
The study brings together data on climate and population trends and quantifies the future global health impacts of climate change. It looks at both direct impacts of extreme weather like heat, floods and storms, and adverse indirect effects of food insecurity, poor air quality or even displacement. For instance, three times more people will be exposed to drought by the end of the century and four times more to extreme rainfall. In many areas, this implies no less than reversing development gains. Urgent action on mitigating climate change and preparing for its health-related challenges is needed: actual carbon emission rates have been even higher than in the worst-case scenario of the previous Lancet study (2009) on health and climate.
Major health co-benefits of climate action should encourage policy-makers to act more decisively. Fortunately, there is increasing momentum. For example, the intergovernmental Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short Lived Climate Pollutants (CCAC), initiated in 2012, emphasises that mitigating methane, black carbon, and HFCs can help avoid two million premature deaths every year. In fact, air pollution was proclaimed one of “the leading avoidable causes of disease and death globally” by the World Health Assembly in a resolution of 26 May 2015, as every year 8 million deaths can be attributed to polluted air exposure indoor and outdoor.
This video explains the report's findings.
As we step into 2020, time has come to implement the Paris Agreement and raise climate ambition, but the geopolitical tide seems to be against it. The best way forward at this crucial juncture might be to forge a ‘climate coalition of the willing’ – recognising and streamlining actions of all actors at all levels.
For the first time in the survey’s 10-year outlook, the top five global risks in terms of likelihood are all environmental. They are: extreme weather events, failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, major natural disasters, major biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and human-made environmental damage and disasters.
Millions of people across Sub-Saharan Africa could face grave hunger in the first half of 2020 because of armed conflict, political instability and climate change-linked disasters, a report says.
The report published by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) this month says that the countries affected will require life-saving food assistance and investment to prevent humanitarian catastrophes.
Australia is currently experiencing one of its worst bushfire seasons, with swathes of the southern and eastern coastal regions having been ablaze for weeks. As the fires have spread, there has been extensive media coverage both nationally and internationally documenting – and debating – their impacts. This Carbon Brief overview summarises how the fires – and the political response to them – have been covered by the media.