Community health worker in Nepal helping giving polio vaccine to a child. Climate change-induced events are affecting basic health facilities directly. Photo: Tanka Dhakal/IPS

By Tanka Dhakal
BAKU, Nov 14 2024 (IPS)

Climate change and its impact on public health hasn’t made the top of the agenda even at a forum like the UN Climate Conference, but is should, say the health community.

Understanding the gap, more than 100 organizations from across the international health and climate community came together as the Global Climate and Health Alliance and have called wealthy countries to protect people’s health by committing to provide climate finance in the order of a trillion dollars annually, in addition to global action with leadership from the highest emitting countries to end the fossil fuel era.

Alliance endorsed nine recommendations for the summit through a policy brief—‘A COP29 for People and Planet’ which includes financing to community engagement.

In an interview with Dr. Jeni Miller, Executive Director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance IPS asked about the recommendations and why they were necessary.

IPS: How and why the international health and climate community came together—why was it necessary, right before COP29?

Miller: For many years, the UN climate negotiations have been going on. For many years, health was not a part of the conversation. And in fact, the Global Climate and Health Alliance was established because a handful of health organizations felt like this is an important health issue, and we need to get health into that conversation, and we’re not seeing it there. Over the years, more and more health organizations have really begun to understand the threat that climate change poses to people’s health. I think a big contributing factor as well is that we are now seeing those impacts of climate change in real time in communities all over the world—every country, every region, is seeing some combination of extreme weather events.

This is directly impacting the communities that we serve, and we have to raise the alarm bell and make sure that we’re pushing for those solutions that are going to protect people’s health. The report, specifically the policy recommendations, is really an attempt to take what we’re seeing from the health perspective, the concerns that we have. About the threat that this poses for people’s health and the reality of the impacts on people’s health, and somewhat translate that into terms that make sense for negotiators to pick that up, understand it, and use it in the context of those actual decision-making processes in the climate talks.

IPS: Wealth is concentrated on one side of the world or one section of the community, but burden—especially public health burden—is on marginalized communities who don’t have access to basic resources. Is there any way that gap will be narrowed in the near future?

Miller: This is such a critically important issue. And unfortunately, we’re seeing some real extremes of wealth disparity—ironically, in countries that have huge wealth disparity within the country, everyone is less healthy than they would be if there was less health disparity. If people were more equal, that would be healthier for everyone. But the reality is, many people, as you say, don’t have the resources to access the basic necessities of life. Healthy food, clean water, electricity of any kind, but particularly clean energy, even access to education, access to basic health care—all of those things are really vital to growing up healthy and to living a healthy life. And the thing that is so clear is that access to those basic necessities early in life makes a tremendous difference in being able to grow up healthy, resilient, and productive.

It’s a huge impact on the individual that’s growing up without those resources—it’s also an impact on society. So, a society that has people that grow up with enough resources to be resilient, healthy, and well educated is a healthier society. And I would argue that that extends not only within a community or even a country but also internationally. So, if we have huge disparities internationally, that’s also kind of a drain on the world, a challenge for the world as a whole. It leads to conflict, it leads to friction, and it leads to difficulty making decisions to tackle climate change together. I would argue that it’s really in the best interest of wealthy countries to make those investments to help the lowest-income, vulnerable countries have the resource they need to address those basic necessities. I think it’s fundamental. It’s the right thing to do.

I think for so many reasons, it’s important that the wealthy countries do step up and provide this kind of resources.

IPS: While talking about the resources, wealthy countries are already far behind on their climate finance commitment. Do you think they will consider financing to protect people’s health?

Miller: This is a major focus of this year’s climate negotiations. In fact, on the table is a major discussion about a new pot of financing for climate change, and I don’t think we know the answer yet as to how that’s going to come out.

It often gets talked about as we can’t economically afford to put in that money. I think a key question is, what is the cost of inaction? If we fail to act, we’re already seeing. The cost of failing to act on climate change is immense. The cost of failing to enable countries to be better, prepared to be better, to have their systems, their water and sanitation systems be stronger, their hospitals be more prepared, etc. The costs are just staggering. So, when we’re talking about, can we afford to put the money into climate action, I think we also need to ask the question, can we afford not to? I think the answer is no. And then the last thing that I’ll say about this is, and this is also important, we are currently subsidizing fossil fuels more than a trillion a year in direct public subsidies. So that’s public money going into supporting the production and use of fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change.

So again, when we’re talking about, can we afford to or are we prepared to invest in climate action and put money into a Climate Fund? We need to ask ourselves the question. What is the cost of not doing so? And then where else is public money going that could be going into moving us in the right direction, towards clean energy, towards climate resilience?

IPS: You talked about the extreme weather events. In recent years, extreme events contributed by climate change are causing destruction en masse; often its monetary losses will be counted but its public health impact is still to be discussed. How do you see climate and health discussion moving forward especially regarding financing?

Miller: I don’t think it happens by itself. In my own country, the US, we are seeing climate-exacerbated disaster, and yet people not accepting the role of climate change in that and not accepting that the health impacts, the dislocation, and the trauma that they’re experiencing were caused by climate change.

It’s not necessarily going to happen just by itself, in in other countries as well. People may be feeling the impacts, but not connecting the dots, and not because of disinformation, not recognizing.

I do think that it’s important for those who know about those connections—the scientists, the advocates, the health professionals who are looking at these issues, the academic departments—to talk about it and articulate what those connections are.

But then I do think that each time one of those extreme weather events does create the opportunity for that conversation to happen, and we need to step up to those opportunities.

And I think that can make a really big difference in changing the nature of the conversation and opening-up possibility for a deeper conversation about what we need to do about this.

IPS: Let’s talk about the report. It talks about healthy climate action for most affected communities. Can you explain it for our audience and what would be the role of the community?

Miller: It’s so often the case that decisions get made without consulting communities affected by those decisions. There can be very good will that is, and good intentions behind that, and yet the results are not going to be as good if you’re not working with the people affected by the issue. The thing that community members know that nobody else knows in the way that they know it is their lived experience of what’s going on in their community, their resources in terms of their own knowledge, their own community relationships, their own resilience, their own techniques. There may be techniques that they know for growing food and their ecosystem.

There may be knowledge you know for forced communities, knowledge that they have of the force that they live in. There is very deep knowledge that communities have about their circumstances, their context, and their needs and what they can bring in terms of solutions, so effectively working with communities means really involving them in the conversation from the get-go when designing programs and projects and all of that sort of thing. And I think when it comes even to financing, thinking about how finance for Climate Solutions reaches that community level.

I think another thing that’s really important to recognize is that climate change puts a huge strain on all of us. It’s a huge psychological strain just to live in the climate era. Enabling communities to come together and be a part of the solution helps to heal that burden.

IPS: You touched on mental health. The report also talks about mental health and wellbeing outcomes—we are seeing people struggling with climate-related post- and pre-event psychological burden in different forms. How do you see this dimension moving forward?

Miller: That is one area where I’ve definitely seen significant progress in the last several years. I think I’ve seen significant progress in increasingly recognizing the health impacts of climate change and the health threat that climate change poses, and then within that, significant progress in beginning to recognize and acknowledge and understand the mental health dimensions of this. There’s a long way to go, but it is a part of the conversation, and it’s an important one.

There are mental health impacts before or after an extreme weather event, and that can show up as kind of anxiety and stress, a variety of things. People who go through major extreme weather events, like the post-traumatic stress of having experienced that and having gone through it, not knowing if it might happen again or when it might happen again.

There’s also the sense of losing one’s world, losing the world that one grew up in, losing the environment that one, the world that one grew up in and seeing those things kind of slip away—this sort of a cultural, ecological and cultural dimension to that. And if you know, failing to acknowledge that mental health dimension both leaves people suffering and also leaves people sort of disempowered.

I think community is important in response to those kinds of mental health challenges—the kind of recognition that there are actions that one can take and ways that one can come together. And some of those actions may be kind of the direct actions of sustainability, working to live a more sustainable lifestyle. I think even, maybe even more important than that, are actions of coming together with the community to influence the kinds of decisions that get made, to call for the kinds of policies that will turn the needle on climate change, to have a voice in the larger conversation. I think that can be even more powerful.

IPS: Do you have anything to add that we may have missed or you wanted to add?

Miller: I think the one thing that I would add is that, right now, every government that’s part of the Paris Agreement is in the process of drafting new national climate commitments.

It’s an important opportunity, not just at the international level, and as at these big international climate talks, but at home, in every single country, for people to call on their governments to make commitments that are aligned with protecting their health from climate change.

Also, I think it’s important to continue to focus on what we can do. The headwinds can feel pretty strong. Addressing climate change will be something that we’re doing for the rest of our lives, not just for the rest of my life—anybody alive today will be dealing with this issue for the rest of our lives. So, we need to maintain our stamina around it and know that this is a long-term commitment and know that it’s worth it.

IPS UN Bureau Report