WHO/Yoshi Shimizu
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Climate change
Overview
Climate change is impacting human lives and health in a variety of ways. It threatens the essential ingredients of good health - clean air, safe drinking water, nutritious food supply, and safe shelter - and has the potential to undermine decades of progress in global health.
Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone. The direct damage costs to health is estimated to be between USD 2-4 billion per year by 2030.
Areas with weak health infrastructure – mostly in developing countries – will be the least able to cope without assistance to prepare and respond. WHO supports countries in building climate-resilient health systems and tracking national progress in protecting health from climate change.
Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases through better transport, food and energy-use choices can result in improved health, particularly through reduced air pollution. The Paris climate Agreement is therefore potentially the strongest health agreement of this century. WHO supports countries in assessing the health gains that would result from the implementation of the existing Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement, and the potential for larger gains from more ambitious climate action.
WHO response
Many policies and individual choices have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and produce major health co-benefits. The phase out of polluting energy systems, for example, or the promotion of public transportation and active movement, could both reduce carbon emissions and cut the burden of household and ambient air pollution, which cause 7 million premature deaths per year.
WHO’s work plan on climate change and health includes:
- Partnerships: to coordinate with partner agencies within the UN system, and ensure that health is properly represented in the climate change agenda;
- Awareness raising: to provide and disseminate information on the threats that climate change presents to human health, and opportunities to promote health while cutting carbon emissions;
- Science and evidence: to coordinate reviews of the scientific evidence on the links between climate change and health and develop a global research agenda;
- Support for implementation of the public health response to climate change: to assist countries to build capacity to reduce health vulnerability to climate change, and promote health while reducing carbon emissions.
More information
Decision-makers can advance climate, health and development objectives by:
- Identifying and promoting actions that both cut carbon emissions and reduce air pollution, and by including specific commitments to cut emissions of Short Climate Pollutants in their National Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement;
- Ensuring that the commitments to assess and safeguard health in the Paris Agreement and in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are also reflected in national and international policy and operational mechanisms;
- Removing barriers to investment in health adaptation to climate change, with a focus on climate resilient health systems, and climate smart healthcare facilities;
- Engagement with the health community, civil society and health professionals, to help them to mobilize collectively to promote climate action and health co-benefits;
- Promoting the role of cities and sub-national governments in climate action benefiting health, within the UNFCCC framework;
- Monitoring and reporting on the health progress resulting from climate actions to the global climate and health governance processes, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals;
- Including of the health implications of mitigation and adaptation measures in economic and fiscal policy.
