Combating Climate Dangers Is Seen as Medical Emergency

International experts say the last 50 years of health advances worldwide will be jeopardised unless urgent steps are taken to confront climate change.

The threat that climate change poses to human health is so great that it could undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health, says an international commission of medical experts.

One author, fiercely critical of international efforts to confront the problem, says it is a medical emergency that demands an emergency response.

More hopefully, though, the group’s report says that international efforts to tackle climate change – “the defining challenge of our generation” – represent one of the greatest opportunities to improve health worldwide this century.

The report, published in The Lancet medical journal, is the work of the 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change.

Unparalleled chance
It says many responses to climate change have direct and indirect health benefits – from reducing air pollution to improving diet – and so efforts to reduce the threat offer an unparalleled chance for far-reaching gains in health.

But the commission is under no illusions about what is at stake. The authors say the potentially catastrophic risk to human health posed by climate change has been underestimated.

They add – in a familiar refrain – that while the technologies and finance required to address the problem do exist, the global political will to implement them is lacking.

Professor Hugh Montgomery, one of the commission’s co-chairs and director of the University College London (UCL) Institute for Human Health and Performance, UK, says: “Climate change is a medical emergency. It thus demands an emergency response, using the technologies available right now.

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