(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Doha: With 170 million people working in the healthcare globally, the health sector could lead on climate change and there is motivation within the profession to act. This is the message of a new report soon to be released by the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) titled ‘Health in the Climate Crisis: A Guide for Health Leaders'.
The new WISH 2020 report, benefiting from a broad advisory group of experts and leaders across the environment, health and healthcare fields, is being produced in partnership with Imperial College London, under the leadership of the co-director of the Imperial College Institute of Global Health Innovation, Dr. David Nabarro. He previously served as special adviser to the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and climate change, and in March was appointed as the World Health Organization (WHO) Special Envoy on COVID-19. Climate change is one of the primary themes of the virtual gathering of global health leaders from November 15 to 19 - WISH 2020 - and several thematic reports highlighting its challenges for healthcare will be released during the summit.
The report's twin imperatives, to make healthcare systems resilient to climate change and to reduce their role in causing it, recognizes that even high-income health systems are insufficiently prepared to respond to major climate-related shocks, and low- and middle-income countries are especially fragile. Additionally, even the best adaptation measures will be insufficient if the scale of the threat from climate change is not reduced.
The authors note that with the size of its workforce, and rising health costs pushing spending to around $8 trillion globally, the healthcare profession has the market power to drive change directly especially when allied with other sectors. ‘Climate-smart' healthcare can, in turn, reduce the sector's 4.6% share of global emissions to make systems greener, more resilient, and of higher quality.
Dr. Nabarro said: 'Our physical and mental health are being affected by climate change all over the world. The more I look into how climate change is affecting people, the more I realize that health workers have a vital role. They can act as advocates - drawing on their own authority and legitimacy as health workers and connecting with people in different sectors in order to collectively ensure that people's health is preserved and indeed optimized despite the fact that climate change causes massive challenges. We hope that the report on Climate Change and Health discussed during WISH 2020 will be of value to the health professionals for the foreseeable future."
In keeping with WISH's emphasis on evidence-based, policy-oriented research, several influential reports will be released in November to align with the summit's varied research themes. WISH has partnered with the BMJ to commission two collections of peer reviewed articles on the effects of climate change on infectious diseases and the growing challenges of dry cities.
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