The World Health Organization (WHO) aims to show how efforts to limit climate change will affect human health — for better or worse — with a new study that will launch early in 2011.
The WHO’s Health in the Green Economy study will examine climate-change mitigation strategies, including those proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Mitigation efforts in sectors such as household energy, transport and housing could help combat major health threats such as obesity and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in both developed and developing countries. However, others could pose health risks or create trade-offs.
Improved building insulation can, for instance, not only save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also bring health benefits. It can reduce reduce people’s exposure to extreme temperatures and harmful damp mould, and so lower their risk from respiratory and infectious diseases. But people could be exposed to new health threats if harmful materials are used to build or insulate houses.
In the transport sector, the IPCC’s mitigation strategies have focused on improved fuels and vehicle technologies, pricing policies, changes to land use planning that makes cities more accessible by walking or cycling, and alternatives to private motorized transport.
The WHO says that the first two proposals will have a weak to moderate reduction of health risk factors. But that latter two would reduce respiratory and cardiovascular diseases from air pollution, limit traffic injuries and reduce noise stress – in addition to reducing risks of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
“Equally important is that such health benefits save money”, says Michael Wilks, immediate past president of the Standing Committee of European Doctors.
Wilks says that the European Union would save 30.5 billion euros in health-care costs by increasing its goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from 20% below 1990 levels by 2020 to 30% below 1990 levels.
This saving represents nearly two-thirds of the annual 46 billion euro cost of such a change as estimated by the European Commission.
“In other words,” says Wilks, “health co-benefits have the potential to offset a large part of the financial costs of climate-change mitigation policies.”
The WHO wants to put health at the heart of the intergovernmental negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), through which governments are meant to be agreeing a global deal to tackle climate change.
“Our aim is to move health protection from being today a footnote in the current climate change negotiation text back to its original status, since the whole objective of the UNFCCC process is supposed to protect human health and welfare”, said Dr Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, WHO scientist on public health and environment.
Campbell-Lendrum was a member of the ‘doctors delegation’ at the UNFCCC conference Cancún, Mexico, last December last year. Their message to the climate negotiators was that: “Addressing climate change through also a health outlook – besides the economic, environmental and social perspectives – is necessary to protect the human health and the well-being of humanity.”
Campbell-Lendrum says climate change can no longer be considered simply as an environment or development issue. “Climate change has also devastating consequences for human health since it affects the basic requirements for maintaining health: clean air and water, sufficient food and adequate shelter,” he says.
“Changing patterns of infections and insect-borne diseases; reduced water and food security, leading to malnutrition and diarrhoeal disease; increased frequency and magnitude of extreme climate events causing flooding and injury are some of the factors that make climate change the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”
