“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.
To fight illegal coca plantations and conflict actors’ income sources, Colombia’s president wants to loosen the ban on aerial glyphosate spraying. However, considering the dynamics of organised crime, the use of toxic herbicides will not only fail to achieve its aim, it will have many adverse effects for the environment and human health, fundamentally undermining ways to reach peace in the country. International cooperation and national policy-makers need to account for this peace spoiler.
As India grapples with the worsening impacts of climate change, the need to strengthen its adaptation efforts has become more significant than ever. Climate diplomacy and mainstreaming climate adaptation into the most vulnerable sectors could provide some solutions to overcoming barriers, such as the lack of sustainable funding.
“Climate Security risks will materialise in very different ways and forms, whether we talk about Lake Chad or about the Arctic, Bangladesh and the Small Island Developing States,” said the EU’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Joao Vale de Almeida, in his opening remarks. “But for the EU, there is no doubt, as underlined in 2016 in our Global Strategy, and reaffirmed by the 28 Ministers of Foreign Affairs, that climate change is a major threat to the security of the EU and to global peace and security more generally,” he said.
The challenges facing the international community are growing while the willingness to cooperate seems to be waning. Foreign policy must help bridge this gap. One way to accomplish this is by pushing forward a major achievement of multilateralism: the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. At a side event during the 2019 High-Level Political Forum, diplomats and policy experts discussed the role of foreign policy in the global sustainability architecture.