We're in a Global Health Emergency Warn Leading Medical Experts

Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss a Human Health Emergency

You'd think when more than 200 of the world’s leading medical journals get together to say climate change and the loss of biodiversity represent a global health emergency and are the biggest determinants of health today it would get a little media coverage.

Let me explain: A couple of weeks ago I happened to be skimming through the British Medical Journal, as hypochondriacs do, and was surprised to see an editorial statement outlining the above.

“Gosh, how could I have missed the media coverage of this,” I thought.

After using a bunch of search tools, including a very expensive proprietary service, it turned out there was almost no media coverage with exception of the Canada’s CBC. (Curiously, there was lots of coverage of a similar effort by medical journals in 2021 that focused only on climate.)

Need-to-Know: Climate and biodiversity crisis is undermining our health say doctors

So you probably haven’t heard this year’s “unequivocal message” from the global medical community on how climate and biodiversity loss are an environmental crisis with enormous health implications. Here are the three main takeaways:

1. Medical professionals are witnessing the health impacts of the environmental crisis including heat stress, malnutrition, anxiety, vector-borne diseases, injuries from extreme weather, and respiratory illnesses to name a few.

2. “To preserve health and avoid catastrophe” political leaders, health professionals, and the United Nations need to urgently address climate change and biodiversity loss as one indivisible environmental crisis.

3. Therefore, the World Health Organization should declare climate change and biodiversity loss a global health emergency.

Need-to-Know: More than 40 million doctors, nurses and other medical professionals demand a fossil-fuel phase out

In a separate effort to make sure everyone understands the health connection, global health organizations such as the World Medical Association, the International Council of Nurses, and other organizations representing 46.3 million health professionals penned an open letter.

The letter calls on countries attending the upcoming UN climate conference COP 28 to commit to an “accelerated, just and equitable phase-out of fossil fuels”. It also says:

A full and rapid phase-out of fossil fuels is the most significant way to provide the clean air, water, and environment that are foundational to good health.

Ending our dangerous dependency on fossil fuels will improve the health prospects of future generations and will save lives.

(You can read their letter here.)

In yet another health warning, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the WHO said climate change threatens to roll back decades of progress in human health. One reason is the escalating number and ferocity of extreme weather events.

Need-to-Know: Increasing numbers of weather disasters means no one is safe

By 2030, the WMO expects 560 medium-to-large-scale weather disasters a year. Yep, 1.5 disasters a day on average. These will undermine the health and well-being of hundreds of millions people, perhaps you and me and our families included.

The global medical community is urging us to take the preventitive medicine of phasing out fossil fuels ASAP.

We should listen to our doctors for a change.

Until next time. Be well.

Stephen

P.S. You should also know this.

Need-to-Know: U.S., Canada, Russia, Australia and OPEC countries plan to dramatically increase their fossil fuel production by 2030.

Here’s a graph that explains what’s going on from the just released UN’s 2023 Production Gap Report.