Climate change, attributable to human activity, is increasingly contributing to a global health crisis. The scale, nature and timing of adverse effects on physical and mental health, via direct and indirect pathways, vary within and between regions but there are common challenges that can be tackled by better integrated mitigation and adaptation actions. The actions described in this paper would have benefits for health if appropriately implemented, both by reducing the health risks of climate change and from the ancillary (co-)benefits of mitigation such as from reduced air pollution as a result of phasing out fossil fuels. There are unprecedented health threats from climate change but also unprecedented opportunities to use scientific knowledge to inform policy and practice. Much can be done now to use the evidence already available to effect rapid and decisive action as well as generating new evidence to support effective policy development and implementation. This paper draws on an inter-regional, inclusive, project by the InterAcademy Partnership, the global network of more than 140 academies of science, engineering and medicine, to summarise evidence available worldwide in order to help inform options for policy making. A particular focus is on clarifying climate change mitigation and adaptation solutions and their implementation for the benefit of the most vulnerable groups. The present authors actively participated in managing this project which encouraged academies to capture diverse impacts and policy options by evaluating and synthesising evidence from their own countries to inform policy for collective and customised action at national, regional and global levels. Using a systems-based approach, recommendations from the project in this publication are transdisciplinary and multisectoral. Despite the accumulating evidence, protecting and improving human health have not yet become major focal points in global climate change policy discussions. Drawing on the IAP project outputs, we strongly recommend that health and health equity must now come to the foreground, accompanied by much greater allocation of climate finance to health-related programmes.
Policy Implications
Our policy recommendations are selected from the IAP project reports to focus on themes of policy relevance covered in the present paper:
- Integration of health priorities is highly relevant for climate policy formulation and implementation in many sectors, such as agriculture/food/land use, energy, transport and urban planning, housing and for governance across local, national, regional and global levels.
- A focus on health helps strategic coordination between Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, National Adaptation Plans, air quality legislation, Sustainable Development Goals and other initiatives, such as for the circular economy and bioeconomy.
- As part of addressing the global climate finance gap, greater ambition in redirecting subsidies and other financial support away from fossil fuels and other polluting activities, to actions that aim to accelerate progress towards net zero GHG emissions, such as those for sustainable cities and food systems, can help to deliver health and equity objectives.
- The COVID-19 pandemic provides important policy lessons for responding to global challenges through cooperation and mobilisation of resources at scale, for recognising the core role of health-in-all-policies, and the need for scientific underpinning of decision-making.
- Post-pandemic fiscal stimulus plans and climate funds provide the opportunity, as yet mainly unrealised, to build in objectives for health, equity and environmental sustainability alongside economic recovery.
- Addressing climate change, together with biodiversity loss and food and nutrition insecurity requires better use of shared evidence between IPCC and IPBES for policy action, and the development of equivalent international scientific advisory capacity for sustainable food systems.
- Health professionals can help to influence climate change policy discussions across all sectors: their credibility is enhanced if the health sector itself acts ambitiously to reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions.
- Academies, with their strong convening powers, have a continuing role in evaluation and delivery of evidence at science-policy interfaces, to advocate for the increasing health focus, to support greater national and regional ambitions to tackle climate change, and to amplify the voices of the vulnerable, who have been too often marginalised in policy debates.
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