Declare climate crisis a global public health emergency: Experts urge WHO

NEW DELHI: The independent pan-European Commission on Climate and Health has urged the World Health Organisation to declare the climate-health crisis a global public health emergency.The agenda focuses on reflecting light upon the pan-European region, where temperature is rising at twice the global average rate, according to WHO. The aim of the commission is to call for action on the factors that are leading the climate crisis to be declared at an extreme level of health alert. The message is direct: to declare the climate crisis a “public health emergency of international concern.”The commission, chaired by former Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir and convened by WHO regional director for Europe Hans Henri P Kluge, published its Call to Action. It comprises former heads of government, international bodies, ministers and civil society leaders across the 53 countries of the WHO European Region.Previously, for diseases like Covid-19 and Mpox, PHEICs have been declared. Although declaring one would not help the climate crisis unless large-scale coordinated international healthcare initiatives are implemented. “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,” said Jakobsdóttir in an interview with The Guardian.Andrew Haines, a professor of environmental change and public health at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the Commission’s chief scientific adviser, said: “WHO has already recognised that climate change is a major threat to global health. What we’re asking for is a step further.”The Commission has proposed 17 recommendations that include four domains: dealing with climate change in a way that recognises it as a threat to health security, transforming health systems, scaling up local action, and reforming the economic and financial systems that are driving the climate crisis. The issue should be addressed by ministries including defence, energy and finance. In recent decades, the geopolitical tensions have made European governments to traditionally spent on security without realising that climate, in itself, is a major security threat. Responding to the 17 recommendations of the commission, Hans Kluge, WHO’s regional director for Europe, said, “The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have clearly shown what fossil fuel dependency really means, not just higher bills, but strained or broken health systems, disrupted food and fuel supplies, and societies under pressure.”Moreover, every year hundreds of thousands of people are killed by air pollution generated from the combustion of fossil fuels across the European region. The Commission also urged governments to stop subsidising fossil fuels, which are directly responsible for 600,000 premature deaths a year in the region alone.“European governments are subsidising the very industries responsible for their own citizens’ premature deaths. We need health leaders to really step into the climate debate and not just be on the receiving end of it,” said Jakobsdóttir.Anna Gilmore, Professor of Public Health and Co-Director of the Centre for 21st Century Public Health (C21PH) at University of Bath, said, “Commercial actors, including the fossil fuel, ultra-processed food, alcohol and tobacco industries, deploy misleading science, regulatory capture and lobbying to protect their markets at the expense of public and planetary health.”The serious situation need immediate actions which should not be unclear, as the cost of late supervision might exceed the cost of early mitigation and adaptation. Instead of subsidising fossil fuels, whose consumption contributes to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country as economic output, governments should be more focused on investing in clean and renewable sources of energy. Geopolitical shocks have also exposed how dependency on fossil fuels makes any society fragile: economically, politically and in terms of health.The current framework of the International Health Regulations, a set of rules designed by WHO around time-bound epidemics, is too outdated for the real-time climate crisis, which is a persistent problem. It does not address a large-scale crisis and inherently treats the issue as background noise rather than an immediate, escalating threat.The report also called for measures to tackle disinformation, greater use of national climate-health impact assessments, as well as recognition that climate change is also a mental health crisis. The report proposed by the Commission urges healthcare systems to become more resilient to climate hazards as healthcare sector accounts for 5% of global emissions worldwide as per the commission's report.“Every country needs to be aware of where its health facilities are situated, how likely they are to be flooded, and how they would deal with an extreme and prolonged heatwave,” Haines said, pointing out that hospitals are often built on floodplains and frequently are not energy efficient.Hospitals should be careful about their greenhouse gas emissions and instead should look for climate-friendly procurement practices. An accountable framework should be deployed where questioning and evaluation both should function simultaneously. This can be done by learning from community-led initiatives in cities that have been successful in implementation. “Learning by doing” will promote the exchange of knowledge at the local level.