Cutting carbon, improving health

Abstract

Events such as the financial crisis and climate change are not quirks of the marketplace or quirks of nature. Instead they are markers of massive failure in international systems that govern the way nations and their populations interact. The contagion of our mistakes shows no mercy and makes no exceptions on the basis of fair play. For example, countries that have contributed least to greenhouse-gas emissions will be the first and hardest hit by climate change. 1 McMichael A Campbell-Lendrum D Kovats R et al. Climate change. in: Ezzati M Lopez A Rodgers A Murray C Comparative quantification of health risks: global and regional burden of disease due to selected major risk factors. World Health Organization, Geneva2004 Google Scholar The climate dividend“Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” So concluded a Lancet—UCL Commission earlier this year.1 A systematic appraisal of available evidence showed that the risks from changing patterns of disease, food insecurity, unsafe water and sanitation, damage to human settlements, extreme events, and population growth and migration were far more severe for human health than most observers had understood. The message added an important new dimension to the political debate about how to respond to climate change. Full-Text PDF Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: household energyEnergy used in dwellings is an important target for actions to avert climate change. Properly designed and implemented, such actions could have major co-benefits for public health. To investigate, we examined the effect of hypothetical strategies to improve energy efficiency in UK housing stock and to introduce 150 million low-emission household cookstoves in India. Methods similar to those of WHO's Comparative Risk Assessment exercise were applied to assess the effect on health that changes in the indoor environment could have. Full-Text PDF Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: urban land transportWe used Comparative Risk Assessment methods to estimate the health effects of alternative urban land transport scenarios for two settings—London, UK, and Delhi, India. For each setting, we compared a business-as-usual 2030 projection (without policies for reduction of greenhouse gases) with alternative scenarios—lower-carbon-emission motor vehicles, increased active travel, and a combination of the two. We developed separate models that linked transport scenarios with physical activity, air pollution, and risk of road traffic injury. Full-Text PDF