The time for talking is over: A call to Take Action on Climate Change

For the last 50 years, global warming has broken recorded history. The earth’s temperature is increasing by burning fossil fuels and cutting down rain forests. This adds an excessive amount of greenhouse gases like methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide naturally occur in the atmosphere are increasing temperatures. CO2 is the greenhouse gas most commonly produced by human activities and it is responsible of global warming.

Climate change and the heightened severity of weather events will cause increased loss of human life, more frequent crop failure, and more displaced people. This will destabilize governments, increase the risk of conflict, and hurt the global economy. Meanwhile, human health is already jeopardized by air and water conditions around the globe.

Human-generated climate change is causing adverse health effects through multiple direct pathways (e.g. heatwaves, sea-level rise, storm frequency and intensity) and indirect pathways (e.g. food and water insecurity, social instability).

A recent report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that current trends will take the world past the 1.5 °C goal in only a few decades. The difference between a 1.5 °C world and a 2 °C world (not to speak of a 3 °C world) is stark.

An extra half degree of warming is likely to mean food scarcity and sea level rise affecting millions more people and severe habitat loss for countless species around the globe. Current trends need not continue: reforestation, escalated deployment of renewable energy, and more sustainable patterns of diet and transportation could eliminate carbon emissions by 2050. It’s past time for an unprecedented mass movement worldwide to demand action from recalcitrant governments. The clock keeps ticking.

Climate change threatens the huge amount of progress made on health and development in the past half century; it threatens to reverse the gains made through the Millennium Development Goals; and it threatens to undermine any efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals – health related or otherwise.

The World Health Organization already predicts that between 2030 and 2050, climate change will cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress. The direct costs to health from climate change, excluding costs in health-determining sectors such as agriculture and water and sanitation, is estimated to be between US$2–4 billion per year by 2030.

I believe we need to think about “health justice”, to ensure that ordinary people are always at the heart of health policy and that their needs are paramount above the profit motives of industry or the short-term calculations of politicians.

I have endeavored to spend my life in the service of those marginalized or made vulnerable by discrimination because of gender, race or poverty and it is clearly a grave health injustice when poor women and their newborn babies are detained in hospitals because their families can’t afford their medical bills.

But this is the reality for thousands of people in health systems dominated by private financing and weak governance. It is urgent to recognize that we are in an unprecedented emergency and to form new and global alliances in favor of humanity and common destiny to stop this saga of greed and irresponsibility. Greed and fear cannot become the deciding elements of the political progress.

Both climate and health policies need to understand the specific needs of vulnerable and marginalised groups who have been too often overlooked, including women, girls, adolescents, people with mental health issues, indigenous peoples, sexual minorities and nomadic communities.

Back to climate change; Climate change affects every person globally. It will change the way we live, work, travel, shop, eat and socialize. Planning for it, and making the changes that are necessary to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, while maintaining vibrant rural and urban communities, is all of our responsibility.

Effective climate action will require much stronger participatory democracy, where local people are actively informed and engaged in decision-making about their own communities and their own futures. People have to believe their input matters and, importantly, they must be able to trust governments and businesses to act in the public interest.

To have an impact, climate action must, therefore, have both bold political leadership and respect for democratic participation. Political will is largely underpinned by economic concerns – national governments need to realize that climate change is a global economic concern.

Government leaders need to stop twiddling their thumbs at COPs while the planet overheats. It is time to knuckle down and agree to a global plan to cut the greenhouse gases causing climate change and build our resilience to climate change impacts.

In addition to action at every level of economies, societies and governments around the world, we still need a global agreement between nations. Without the UN, some governments could just walk away from the problem. Without the UN, how will nations decide which country should do what in a way that is fair to all? We need a UN forum to check that countries’ climate plans are adequate to the scale of the challenge.

All of us here  also have the responsibility to put pressure on leaders to take climate and health seriously, to see them as human rights issues that are inextricably intertwined, and to make these leaders understand that if they do not act in concert with each other, they are damning us all to failure, if not annihilation.

Let’s fight for our dignity and our right to a livable world. As we go forward today, let us all take heart and work together for a world where everyone enjoys the right to health, a thriving environment and a peaceful planet to bequeath to subsequent generations.

Finally, this alarming climate change situation is a call for action to all of us for playing a positive role in our own limited capacities, as this is our planet and we must take its good care for ourselves and the generations to come. Remember: no one can do this alone, but together, we have a chance to save our only planet Earth. I call on all of us to elevate climate change in our conversations with clients, industry partners, and elected officials. Add your firm to our Call to Action. We are equal to the task. But we must not wait.