SWITZERLAND — The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for health to be “at the center” of climate change negotiations at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt.
Through a statement, the WHO has urged that COP27 conclude “with progress in the four key objectives of mitigation, adaptation, financing, and collaboration to face the climate crisis.”
COP27 will be a crucial opportunity for the world to come together and recommit to keeping alive the goal of the 2016 Paris Agreement, which set out to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“Climate change is making millions of people sick or more vulnerable to disease around the world, and the increasing destructiveness of extreme weather events disproportionately affects poor and marginalized communities,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
“It is crucial that leaders and decision-makers come together at COP27 to put health at the center of the negotiations.”
According to WHO data, between 2030 and 2050 climate change is expected to cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress.
The costs of direct damage to health (that is, excluding costs in determining sectors for health such as agriculture and water and sanitation), are estimated between US$2 billion and US$4 billion per year by 2030.
For all this, the WHO has called on governments to lead “a fair, equitable, and rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and the transition to a clean energy future.”
In addition, the international health organization has called for the creation of a treaty on the non-proliferation of fossil fuels that allows the elimination of coal and other fossil fuels that are harmful to the atmosphere in a fair and equitable way.
“This would represent one of the most significant contributions to mitigating climate change,” defends the WHO.
According to the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) latest analysis of climate observations, fossil fuel combustion and cement production were the two main causes of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reaching 149% of the pre-industrial level in 2021.
In this context, WHO has insisted that climate policy “must now put health at the center and promote climate change mitigation policies that simultaneously provide health benefits.”
“A climate policy focused on health would help achieve a planet with cleaner air, fresh water and more abundant and safer food, more effective and fairer health and social protection systems and, consequently, healthier people,” WHO contends.
In addition, WHO also asserts the importance of reducing the emissions of climate pollutants in the short term.
For example, the application of stricter regulations for vehicle emissions, which have been estimated to save approximately 2.4 million lives a year, thanks to improving air quality, and will reduce global warming by about 0.5°C by 2050.
“The cost of renewable energy sources has fallen considerably in recent years, and solar energy is now cheaper than coal or gas in most large economies,” the WHO stresses.
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