??????"The greatest threat to global public health"??????
Ryan Hagen
Huge sustainability nerd. Writing a book! Founder, Crowdsourcing Sustainability. Empowering people to help reverse global heating asap. Write newsletter for 200,000+. TEDx & UN recognized | Speaker | LinkedIn Top Voices
In an unprecedented move, 233 health journals around the world simultaneously published a joint article calling continued inaction on climate "the greatest threat to global public health".
I shared a link to this some weeks ago. But I found it extremely powerful so I wanted to share the full thing with you in case you haven't seen it (they gave me the green light to republish it).
Doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals all over the world are yelling from the rooftops, demanding climate action for the health of people everywhere.
I want to do what little I can to help amplify their voices and their message.
And I encourage you to do the same.
Lastly, a massive thank you to the 250+ health journals that published or supported this piece. (Please keep speaking up on climate - we need your voices!)
I wanted you to see for yourself both the number and diversity of these journals so I've included the full list below. The unity across so many subjects and geographies is quite impressive.
Okay, that's enough from me. Enjoy these clear, passionate, and powerful words from our health experts:
Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature Increases, Restore Biodiversity, and Protect Health
The United Nations General Assembly in September 2021 will bring countries together at a critical time for marshalling collective action to tackle the global environmental crisis. They will meet again at the biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, and at the climate conference (COP26) in Glasgow, United Kingdom. Ahead of these pivotal meetings, we — the editors of health journals worldwide — call for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5° C, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health.
Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades.1?The science is unequivocal: a global increase of 1.5° C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.2,3?Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with Covid-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions.
Reflecting the severity of the moment, this editorial appears in health journals across the world. We are united in recognizing that only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory.
The risks to health of increases above 1.5° C are now well established.2?Indeed, no temperature rise is “safe.” In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people over 65 years of age has increased by more than 50%.4?Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.5,6?Harms disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including children, older populations, ethnic minorities, poorer communities, and those with underlying health problems.2,4
Global heating is also contributing to the decline in global yield potential for major crops, which has fallen by 1.8 to 5.6% since 1981; this decline, together with the effects of extreme weather and soil depletion, is hampering efforts to reduce undernutrition.4?Thriving ecosystems are essential to human health, and the widespread destruction of nature, including habitats and species, is eroding water and food security and increasing the chance of pandemics.3,7,8
The consequences of the environmental crisis fall disproportionately on those countries and communities that have contributed least to the problem and are least able to mitigate the harms. Yet no country, no matter how wealthy, can shield itself from these impacts. Allowing the consequences to fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable will breed more conflict, food insecurity, forced displacement, and zoonotic disease — with severe implications for all countries and communities. As with the Covid-19 pandemic, we are globally as strong as our weakest member.
Rises above 1.5° C increase the chance of reaching tipping points in natural systems that could lock the world into an acutely unstable state. This would critically impair our ability to mitigate harms and to prevent catastrophic, runaway environmental change.9,10
Global Targets Are Not Enough
Encouragingly, many governments, financial institutions, and businesses are setting targets to reach net-zero emissions, including targets for 2030. The cost of renewable energy is dropping rapidly. Many countries are aiming to protect at least 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030.11
These promises are not enough. Targets are easy to set and hard to achieve. They are yet to be matched with credible short- and longer-term plans to accelerate cleaner technologies and transform societies. Emissions reduction plans do not adequately incorporate health considerations.12?Concern is growing that temperature rises above 1.5° C are beginning to be seen as inevitable, or even acceptable, to powerful members of the global community.13?Relatedly, current strategies for reducing emissions to net zero by the middle of the century implausibly assume that the world will acquire great capabilities to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.14,15
This insufficient action means that temperature increases are likely to be well in excess of 2° C,16?a catastrophic outcome for health and environmental stability. Critically, the destruction of nature does not have parity of esteem with the climate element of the crisis, and every single global target to restore biodiversity loss by 2020 was missed.17?This is an overall environmental crisis.18
Health professionals are united with environmental scientists, businesses, and many others in rejecting that this outcome is inevitable. More can and must be done now — in Glasgow and Kunming — and in the immediate years that follow. We join health professionals worldwide who have already supported calls for rapid action.1,19
Equity must be at the center of the global response. Contributing a fair share to the global effort means that reduction commitments must account for the cumulative, historical contribution each country has made to emissions, as well as its current emissions and capacity to respond. Wealthier countries will have to cut emissions more quickly, making reductions by 2030 beyond those currently proposed20,21?and reaching net-zero emissions before 2050. Similar targets and emergency action are needed for biodiversity loss and the wider destruction of the natural world.
To achieve these targets, governments must make fundamental changes to how our societies and economies are organized and how we live. The current strategy of encouraging markets to swap dirty for cleaner technologies is not enough. Governments must intervene to support the redesign of transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more. Global coordination is needed to ensure that the rush for cleaner technologies does not come at the cost of more environmental destruction and human exploitation.
Many governments met the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic with unprecedented funding. The environmental crisis demands a similar emergency response. Huge investment will be needed, beyond what is being considered or delivered anywhere in the world. But such investments will produce huge positive health and economic outcomes. These include high-quality jobs, reduced air pollution, increased physical activity, and improved housing and diet. Better air quality alone would realize health benefits that easily offset the global costs of emissions reductions.22
These measures will also improve the social and economic determinants of health, the poor state of which may have made populations more vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic.23?But the changes cannot be achieved through a return to damaging austerity policies or the continuation of the large inequalities of wealth and power within and between countries.
领英推荐
Cooperation Hinges on Wealthy Nations Doing More
In particular, countries that have disproportionately created the environmental crisis must do more to support low- and middle-income countries to build cleaner, healthier, and more resilient societies. High-income countries must meet and go beyond their outstanding commitment to provide $100 billion a year, making up for any shortfall in 2020 and increasing contributions to and beyond 2025. Funding must be equally split between mitigation and adaptation, including improving the resilience of health systems.
Financing should be through grants rather than loans, building local capabilities and truly empowering communities, and should come alongside forgiving large debts, which constrain the agency of so many low-income countries. Additional funding must be marshalled to compensate for inevitable loss and damage caused by the consequences of the environmental crisis.
As health professionals, we must do all we can to aid the transition to a sustainable, fairer, resilient, and healthier world. Alongside acting to reduce the harm from the environmental crisis, we should proactively contribute to global prevention of further damage and to action on the root causes of the crisis. We must hold global leaders to account and continue to educate others about the health risks of the crisis. We must join in the work to achieve environmentally sustainable health systems before 2040, recognizing that this will mean changing clinical practice. Health institutions have already divested more than $42 billion of assets from fossil fuels; others should join them.4
The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5° C and to restore nature. Urgent, society-wide changes must be made and will lead to a fairer and healthier world. We, as editors of health journals, call for governments and other leaders to act, marking 2021 as the year that the world finally changes course.
This editorial?was published on September 5, 2021, at NEJM.org.
From: New England Journal of Medicine, Lukoye Atwoli, Abdullah H. Baqui, Thomas Benfield, Raffaella Bosurgi, Fiona Godlee, Stephen Hancocks, Richard Horton, Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Carlos Augusto Monteiro, Ian Norman, Kirsten Patrick, Nigel Praities,?et al., Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature Increases, Restore Biodiversity, and Protect Health, 385:1134-1137, ? (2021) Massachusetts Medical Society. Reprinted with permission from Massachusetts Medical Society.
Full list of authors and signatories to climate emergency editorial September 2021
This editorial was published simultaneously in the following journals:
In addition, the following journals are supporting the editorial
That's a?whole?lotta healthcare professionals demanding immediate and bold climate action for human health.
Perhaps the leaders of countries, states, cities, communities, corporations, schools, institutions, etc. should listen to them.
Or, more realistically, perhaps we all need to do whatever we can to make sure the leaders in our spheres of influence make climate positive policy and investment decisions from here on out.
Take care,
Ryan
P.S. Crowdsourcing Sustainability is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit run by myself and 3 wonderful volunteers.?If you believe this work is valuable, please consider?investing in our work?so we can keep increasing our climate impact.?Our 2021 budget is $78,198. So far we've raised $25,044. Large or small, your donation is deeply appreciated!
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(This article was originally published?here?on Crowdsourcing Sustainability.)
Performance Administrator and Regional CSR Lead at Equans
3 年what a great project Ryan
Student at Strayer University
3 年Ok I have been in wait for this aspect of sustainable life to manifest itself may I ask that we keep in touch and I am awaiting certain well known figures to respond a request for a presentation I am trying to set up with Golden Key Honour society to address these as well as other aspects criticism and such with major companies to not only promote my business with vclientel but to start a network of individuals from a feeds of this spectrum if interested I would like you to stay in touch as well as I would love to invite you to this presentation to network yhose ideas to basically spread seeds of growth for new pheasable innovations that are needed. I hope you will join me if I can get this worked out and please ill be monitoring to see any other ideas or values as well . Thank you friend.
Thank You So Much for sharing this excellent and comprehensive essay, Ryan! I genuinely appreciate how the authors adopt a holistic approach, and address the full scope and breadth of the environmental crisis currently threatening our planet. And I really pray that all climate and sustainability initiatives, will follow suit in their communications programs. I am truly hopeful that emphasizing the devastating effects of habitat destruction and erosion of biodiversity, will resonate infinitely more with the general public, than solely focusing on the harm inflicted by atmospheric carbon buildup. Human beings obviously find what we can experience with our senses, to be significantly more emotionally powerful than those phenomena we cannot sense. As gravely concerned as I am by carbon driven global heating, witnessing videos of giant trees being felled by loggers or confined, suffering Minks and Foxes awaiting slaughter on industrial fur farms, is infinitely more gut wrenching and sickening for me. I also so appreciate the consistent focus on wealthy nations aiding underprivileged ones, in achieving their climate and sustainability goals. It is appalling to contemplate developing communities, being told to sacrifice power generation and other vitally essential survival needs, because rich entities refuse to strengthen their conservation commitments. Such inequality is the antithesis of environmental justice, and a significant impediment to achieving NetZero and 1.5 C, as the poor will understandably become disillusioned with climate action. All organizations must adopt the fair and inclusive mentality of these physicians, in order to achieve any palpable global ecological healing.
Senior Energy & Water Efficiency Consultant | Technical Writer & Content Strategist
3 年Ryan; I've been screaming about this for 20 years, specifically about water. Every test well that I have drilled for ICI and DOD customers contained incredible concentrations of PFOS, among other VOC's. I was designing a plan at one of our Nevada ARMY Installations, and asked to speak 'in private' with the Command. My Question: "WNEN the grid is taken down we will lose access to Potable Water very quickly. Would you be able to guess how long we can live without water? The answer was similar to what I heard from the other 100+ Americans provided; they thught it was at least 7 or 8 days. The Truth is that it is only 3 days !
Looking towards better cities throughout North America.
3 年They should have done biotech to reduce plastic and nuclear to reduce ghg and harmful chemical.