Health

Climate Change and Health: A Lens to Refocus on the Needs of the Poor

The Commonwealth Secretariat – Editor, Joan Ross Frankson

Adaptation strategies to deal effectively with the anticipated health impacts of climate change are in the early stages of development. It is therefore vital that careful consideration is given to the policy options available to ensure that policy responses are evidence based, ethical and use scarce resources efficiently.

Climate change is expected to be ecologically and socially transforming. It is likely to increase the burdens of existing diseases by exposing new populations to vector-borne diseases, intensifying health stresses from extreme temperatures and impaired agricultural productivity, and exacerbating existing health inequalities.

The response to these increased health burdens should not be to demand new responses to new problems, but rather to find solutions to crucial existing problems: lack of access to water and basic sanitation, lack of access to primary health care, and food insecurity.

This is not to deny that climate change will introduce new pressures that could have health impacts for which we should prepare, such as rising sea levels, flooding and salinisation. But the emphasis must be on ensuring that the agenda for climate change and health remains focused on anticipated needs, and the interventions that can respond to these needs, to bring about genuine health improvement.

As such, the growing interest in climate change and health is an opportunity to refocus on the health needs of the poor, and to make these concerns paramount in developing adaptation and mitigation policies.

Early Stages
Defining the climate change and health policy agenda

During the last decade climate change has become a major topic in international affairs. This debate has been dominated by arguments about the reduction of greenhouse gases, leaving other concerns, most notably the health impacts of climate change, largely outside the attention of global policy-makers.

While the discussion on the anthropogenic causes of climate change and its impacts on human societies has advanced from academic enquiry to (for the most part) a global discourse on practical policy responses, the debate on the health impacts of climate change has not yet fully moved from research to policy.

For those involved in international public health policy-making this is an important time: a good body of research exists on the likely health impacts and their burdens, yet many countries are only just beginning to develop adaptation strategies.

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