Why should health professionals care about climate change?

This year, for the first time, the UK has sent a delegation of 5 medical students to the UN climate talks. Before we left, almost everyone one I told asked me a variation on the same basic question: ‘what has health got to do with climate change?’ This seemed pretty understandable within the UK- as medical students we spend very little time thinking about the broader social processes which we’re involved in, and tend to focus on frantically trying to learn the 15 most common causes of shortness of breath, or what ‘Rhabdomyolysis’ actually means, before our next exam. However, since we arrived, the same question has also been asked of us by an alarming number of the negotiators at COP17.

So, what does health have to do with climate change? And why are we sending a delegation of 5 medics all the way to South Africa, with the inevitable carbon and economic burden that this causes?

Firstly, climate change poses the largest threat to global health of this century. Whether you look at it in terms of increasing and spreading patterns of infectious diseases, such as malaria or dengue fever… or in terms of extreme weather events, such as floods and droughts… OR in terms of sea level rise forcing people out of their homes and causing mass migration, there’s no way of getting around it.

But we don’t really need another group of scientists telling us how potentially catastrophic climate change could be, do we?

And this is where, for me, the message of health becomes really important for the climate change negotiations. We can use many of the ways in which we mitigate climate change to also make us healthier, and to save us money. A move towards active transport- even just walking and cycling slightly more in relation to driving-would significantly decrease heart disease, lung disease, depression, certain forms of cancer, AND be cheaper. In addition, driving less would reduce the number of road traffic accidents, which are the leading cause of mortality in parts of Africa, and reduce the number of lung cancers caused by living in polluted cities. And decreasing the use of inefficient cook stoves in countries in Southern Asia would reduce emissions and remove up to one third of heart and lung disease, especially in women and children.

So, what does health have to do with climate change? If we get this right, we have the opportunity to be healthier, happier and tackle climate change, all at the same
time.