Abstract
The past 12 months have brought an unprecedented surge in awareness of and engagement with the climate emergency. Last week, Collins Dictionary named “climate strike” as their 2019 Word of the Year, after recording a 100-fold increase in usage this year. This endorsement reflects the momentum of school climate strikes and the Extinction Rebellion protests that are applying pressure to governments and the private sector to act on the climate crisis. Furthermore, against the backdrop of political choices faced by the UK, The Guardian newspaper reported last week that two-thirds of people in the UK now consider the climate emergency to be the biggest issue facing humankind. Italian schools will include climate change as a topic in curricula from next year. And around the world, universities and academic institutions are divesting from fossil fuels and scrutinising their carbon footprints. Yet the link made by individuals between health issues and climate change is weak. A new indicator presented for the first time in the 2019 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change—5.2: individual engagement in health and climate change—tracks and analyses online behaviour on the basis of English language Wikipedia search activity (accounting for about 50% of global Wikipedia use). The indicator tracks clickstream activity, capturing onward visits when a user has searched for either a health issue or for climate change. Health is the driver between the very few co-clicks made, with just 0·18% of total health clicks leading to a climate change article, and 1·12% of co-clicks from a climate change article to a health issue. Engagement elucidates understanding of why the climate crisis matters, grounding the effects in real-life terms that are readily relatable. With both health and the climate crisis engaging such heightened interest, an opportunity exists for health professionals to bring the inextricable links between them into focus. The Lancet Countdown annual report is a resource that provides the evidence and tools to do just that. The 2019 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: ensuring that the health of a child born today is not defined by a changing climateThe Lancet Countdown is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration, dedicated to monitoring the evolving health profile of climate change, and providing an independent assessment of the delivery of commitments made by governments worldwide under the Paris Agreement. Full-Text PDF
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