Kate Kelland Reuters Yahoo News 23 Jun 15;
LONDON (Reuters) - The threat to human health from climate change is so great that it could undermine the last 50 years of gains in development and global health, experts warned on Tuesday.
Extreme weather events such as floods and heat waves bring rising risks of infectious diseases, poor nutrition and stress, the specialists said, while polluted cities where people work long hours and have no time or space to walk, cycle or relax are bad for the heart as well as respiratory and mental health.
Almost 200 countries have set a 2 degrees C global average temperature rise above pre-industrial times as a ceiling to limit climate change, but scientists say the current trajectory could lead to around a 4 degrees C rise in average temperatures, risking droughts, floods, storms and rising sea levels.
"That has very serious and potentially catastrophic effects for human health and human survival," said Anthony Costello, director of University College London's (UCL) Institute for Global Health, who co-led the report.
"We see climate change as a major health issue, and that's often neglected in policy debates," he told reporters at a briefing in London.
The report, commissioned and published by The Lancet medical journal, was compiled by a panel of specialists including European and Chinese climate scientists and geographers, social, environmental and energy scientists, biodiversity experts and health professionals.
It said that because responses to mitigate climate change have direct and indirect health benefits - from reducing air pollution to improving diet - a concerted effort would also provide a great opportunity to improve global health.
The report said direct health impacts of climate change come from more frequent and intense extreme weather events, while indirect impacts come from changes in infectious disease patterns, air pollution, food insecurity and malnutrition, displacement and conflicts.
"Climate Change is a medical emergency," said Hugh Montgomery, director of UCL's institute for human health and performance and a co-author on the report. "It demands an emergency response using technologies available right now."
The panel said there were already numerous ways to bring about immediate health gains with action on climate change.
Burning fewer fossil fuels reduces respiratory diseases, for example, and getting people walking and cycling more cuts pollution, road accidents and rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
Cardiovascular disease is the world's number one killer, leading to some 17 million deaths a year, according to World Health Organization data.
"There's a big (energy) saving in people using calories to get around, and there are some immediate gains from more active lifestyles," Montgomery said.
(Reporting by Kate Kelland)
Climate change threatens 50 years of progress in global health, study says
But slashing fossil fuel use also presents greatest global opportunity to improve people’s health in 21st century, says Lancet and UCL commission
Damian Carrington and Sarah Boseley The Guardian 23 Jun 15;
Climate change threatens to undermine half a century of progress in global health, according to a major new report.
But the analysis also concludes that the benefits to health resulting from slashing fossil fuel use are so large that tackling global warming also presents the greatest global opportunity to improve people’s health in the 21st century.
The report was produced by the Lancet/UCL commission on health and climate change, a collaboration of dozens of experts from around the world, and is backed by Margaret Chan, head of the UN World Health Organisation.
“We see climate change as a major health issue and that it is often neglected in the policy debates,” said Professor Anthony Costello, director of the UCL Institute of Global Health and co-chair of the commission.
“On our current trajectory, going to 4C [of warming] is somewhere we don’t want to go and that has very serious and potentially catastrophic effects for human health and human survival and could undermine all of the last half-century’s gains. We see that as a medical emergency because the action we ned to do to stop that in its tracks and get us back onto a 2C trajectory or less requires action now – and action in the next ten years – otherwise the game could be over.”
The comprehensive analysis sets out the direct risks to health, including heatwaves, floods and droughts, and indirect – but no less deadly – risks, including air pollution, spreading diseases, famines and mental ill-health. A rapid phase-out of coal from the global energy mix is among the commission’s top recommendations, given the millions of premature deaths from air pollution this would prevent.
The report states that political will is now the major barrier to delivering a low-carbon economy and the associated improvements to health and poverty, not finance or technology.
The authors argue that health has been neglected from the climate change debate. It says doctors and other health professionals must take a leading role in ending society’s “addiction” to fossil fuels, having confronted “powerful entrenched interests”, such as the tobacco industry, in the past.
“A public health perspective has the potential to unite all actors behind a common cause — the health and wellbeing of our families, communities, and countries,” the report states. “These concepts are far more tangible and visceral than tonnes of atmospheric CO2, and are understood and prioritised across all populations.”
The commission is seeking consciously to shift the balance from what Costello called “catastrophism” to a far more positive message about the potential for improving human health.
“We are getting fatter, we’re getting heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, respiratory ill-health, depression, anxiety and virtually all of things we want to do to protect us against climate change will improve our health, whether it’s active transport – walking, cycling – eating healthier sustainable local diets or cutting air pollution. All of that will have a huge health dividend, health benefits and save a lot of money,” said Costello.
The report is the latest in a line of significant interventions in the run-up to a crunch UN climate summit in Paris in December, when nations hope to agree a global deal on cutting emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in November of “severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts” from global warming, shortly after an international group of economists warned that the world’s future economic growth depended on taming climate change.
Last week, Pope Francis issued a rare encyclical which set out a passionately-argued moral case for acting on both climate change and poverty. In May, financial experts at the International Monetary Fund revealed that the full costs of fossil fuels being picked up by taxpayers runs at $10m (£6m) per minute, more than the total spent on healthcare by the world’s governments.
Chan said the latest Lancet/UCL commission report was “very timely”, coming a few months ahead of the Paris conference. The first commission report, which warned that “climate change is the greatest health threat of the 21st century”, was published in 2009 ahead of the ultimately unsuccessful UN climate summit in Copenhagen.
Chan highlighted the huge benefits to be gained by tackling air pollution, shown by the new report. “Air pollution is one of the most important health risk factors globally, comparable to tobacco smoking, and the largest killer in some countries,” she said.
Deaths from air pollution are rising around the world. The Lancet report cites research estimating that cutting carbon emissions would cut premature deaths from air pollution by 500,000 a year in 2030, 1.3m in 2050 and 2.2m in 2100, particularly in the heavily polluted cities of India and China. Other work in the US shows the boosts to human health can be worth 10 times the costs of cutting emissions.
The report details the range of damage to health that global warming causes, including heatwaves whose deadly effects are rising around the world, for example in Russia in 2010 where 11,000 people died. Dengue fever is likely to spread, the report finds, and malaria cases may rise in some areas while falling in others. Cholera outbreaks occur when hurricanes mix waste and drinking water and extreme weather is increasing.
Food shortages may increase as climate change harms crops and livestock and the ability to work in hot climates, the report states. Such shortages can lead people to migrate as refugees, leading to further health problems, or even to conflicts. People forced to move, whether by food shortages, floods or extreme storms, can suffer serious mental health problems.
Mohga Kamal-Yann, Oxfam’s senior health policy advisor, said: “Rapid action to tackle global emissions and help communities adapt is crucial to reduce the threats of ill-health, hunger and additional hardship. Rich countries can and should make substantial cuts to their emissions by phasing out coal and by providing the funding that developing countries need to cope with climate change.”
The Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign has been highlighting the impact of climate change on public health by focusing on the world’s two largest health charities – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. The campaign is asking them to move their investments out of fossil fuel companies.
Top doctors' prescription for feverish planet: Cut out coal
SETH BORENSTEIN Associated Press Yahoo News 23 Jun 15;
WASHINGTON (AP) — Some top international doctors and public health experts have issued an urgent prescription for a feverish planet Earth: Get off coal as soon as possible.
Substituting cleaner energy worldwide for coal will reduce air pollution and give Earth a better chance at avoiding dangerous climate change, recommended a global health commission organized by the prestigious British medical journal Lancet. The panel said hundreds of thousands of lives each year are at stake and global warming "threatens to undermine the last half century of gains in development and global health."
It's like a cigarette smoker with lung problems: Doctors can treat the disease, but the first thing that has to be done is to get the patient to stop smoking, or in this case get off coal in the next five years, commission officials said in interviews.
"The prescription for patient Earth is that we've got a limited amount of time to fix things," said commission co-chairman Dr. Anthony Costello, a pediatrician and director of the Global Health Institute at the University College of London. "We've got a real challenge particularly with carbon pollution."
He called it a "medical emergency" that could eventually dwarf the deadly toll of HIV in the 1980s. He and others said burning coal does more than warm the Earth, but causes even more deaths from other types of air pollution that hurt people's breathing and hearts.
Unlike its earlier report in 2009, which laid out the health problems of climate change, this report was more about what can be done to improve the planet's health. It calls for cutting air pollution, more walking and cycling and less driving, better urban design, putting a price on the cost of each ton of carbon being used, improved health care planning for extreme weather and every two year check-ups on how the world is doing to get healthier.
View galleryFILE - In this Jan. 20, 2015 file photo, a plume of …
FILE - In this Jan. 20, 2015 file photo, a plume of steam billows from the coal-fired Merrimack Stat …
"Virtually everything that you want to do to tackle climate change has health benefits," Costello said. "We're going to cut heart attacks, strokes, diabetes."
The Lancet commission report came out days after an impassioned plea to fight global warming by Pope Francis and hours after the President Barack Obama's administration issued a report emphasizing the costs of inaction on climate change and the benefits of doing something now. The Obama administration said if nothing is done, at the turn of the next century about 57,000 Americans will die each year from polluted air and at least another 12,000 yearly from extreme temperatures.
"Obama is not a doctor; people trust doctors more," Costello said.
In a companion posting in Lancet, World Health Organization director general Margaret Chan also compares fighting climate change to fighting smoking and saving lives. Both Chan and the Lancet commission quote WHO studies that say by 2030 climate change would "be likely to cause about 250,000 additional deaths per year" around the world.
Poverty is the main problem and burning coal to produce electricity helps fight that, said National Mining Association spokesman Luke Popovich. He said, "it makes far more sense to support the technologies that make coal cleaner to use than to support policies that would deny its use to those who rightfully want the comforts of civilization."
But Harvard School of Public Health epidemiologist Joel Schwartz called the Lancet study's coal phase-out "a reasonable prescription for planet Earth. Burning coal has terrible health effects, is bad for global warming and it is destructive of the ecosystem."
The Lancet: http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/climate-change
