Treat climate crisis as a global public health emergency on a level with Covid, experts tell WHO
Experts warn climate change is "a public health emergency that threatens humanity’s very health and survival"
The climate emergency should be treated as a public health threat on the same level as Covid to avoid "millions" of deaths, leading experts have told the World Health Organisation (WHO).
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The WHO has been told to declare the climate crisis “a public health emergency of international concern” - the highest level of health alert. Previous declarations include Covid and Mpox.
A report by the independent pan-European commission on climate and health said climate change "poses an immediate and long-term threat to health, economic, food, water, environmental, personal, community and national security.”
The findings will be presented to European ministers on Sunday before the WHO’s world health assembly begins on Monday.
The report warned the spread of vector-borne diseases including Dengue fever and Chikungunya, along with the hearth impacts of extreme weather, global heating, food insecurity and air pollution made increasing the threat level necessary.
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Katrín Jakobsdóttir, a former prime minister of Iceland who chaired the commission, told the Guardian: “The climate crisis may not be a pandemic, but it’s still a public health emergency that threatens humanity’s very health and survival. And if we don’t act more quickly and comprehensively, many millions more people could die or face life-changing illness.”
Professor Andrew Haines of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the commission’s chief scientific adviser, said the WHO had already declared climate change as a major threat to public health but that it was time to go further.
He added: “If we carry on emitting at current rates, that will accelerate the risks to health for both current and future generations including: more people suffering and dying from excess heat, floods and infectious diseases, air pollution from wildfires, more preterm births and more food insecurity.”
The commission also called on governments to stop subsidising fossil fuels, which cause 600,000 premature deaths a year in Europe according to the report.
The region spends roughly €444 billionn (£387bn) a year on subsidies for oil and gas production, the report said.
Jakobsdóttir told the Guardian: "Climate change is not happening somewhere else, to someone else, in the future. It is shortening lives in European cities right now. It is filling hospitals. It is driving anxiety and stress and other mental health issues."
She added: “When the health argument and the climate argument are the same argument, it becomes very hard to oppose.”
Dr Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, said that the climate crisis was no longer just an environmental issue, and that the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine had shown the impact of fossil fuel dependency on health systems, food and fuel supply chains and social stability.
He went on that the case for acting on climate was "not just environmental. It is a security argument, a health argument and an economic argument".
He added: "I commit to ensuring that climate change is treated as the health emergency it is across the 53 member states of the WHO European region.”