The Annual UN Climate Conference, COP18 took place last week in Doha. This year, Jonny Elliott went to represent Healthy Planet at the conference. It was a tiring, exciting and often frustrating fortnight of advocacy for him - engaging with young people from around the world, negotiators from Sub-Saharan Africa and small island states, which are particularly vulnerable to climate change, and members of the WHO team amongst others – and above all an eye-opening one.
COP18 delivered some wins - a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol; loss and damage was put on the agenda, albeit in vague terms; and gender made it into the spotlight. But overall, the outcomes are miles away from what the science tells us we need: emissions reductions pledges are far below those required to avoid a 2°C rise, inadequate commitments on pre-2020 adaptation finance and barely a mention of health. Frustratingly, climate change is still seen only as a threat to ecosystems or the economy, rather than people's health.
With several other organisations, Healthy Planet UK were involved in putting together the Doha Declaration on Climate, Health and Wellbeing – now signed by over 80 organisations and more than 1200 individuals – sought to address this. The Declaration was launched during the Summit. It highlights the effects of climate change on current and future health, the cost to health of carbon and the immense health and economic ‘co-benefits’ of meaningful climate action. Most of the health impacts people know about are direct ones, e.g. vector-borne diseases, heatwaves or flooding, yet global predictions for future food availability may be wildly off because they don’t include the effect of extremes. Plus food insecurity can have huge indirect impacts by forcing people to migrate, and driving civil conflict.
There is still time to add your signature to this critical declaration – it takes 30 seconds to sign up here. Beyond signing petitions and taking steps in our personal lives, what else can we do? We can campaign to divest and move our money away from fossil fuels; we can call on governments to pay their fair share and to find new sources for adaptation finance; and we can engage, as the CSH’s members do, in the real work of making our economy and the different sectors within it much more sustainable.
Whilst the outcomes from Doha are bad news given the seriousness of the situation, we would be in a worse position if the process had collapsed entirely. The UK Climate Change Secretary, Ed Davey, commented, 'we wanted to pave the way for the future [discussions on a new global treaty] and we've done that'. As Alden Meyer, head of the USA’s Union of Concerned Scientists put it recently, “we have lots of work ahead of us, both in our home countries and at the international level, if we expect to get better outcomes.” That will require action not only by our governments but also by us, and the health profession isn’t exempt from this challenge.
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