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
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