Health is the human face of climate change. Here’s what President-elect Trump should do about it.
By Michele Barry, director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) and Stanford Health Policy associate; Katherine States Burke, deputy director of CIGH; and Diana Chapman Walsh, former president of Wellesley College and adviser to CIGH’s Climate Change and Health Initiative
In this series, FSI experts share their recommendations for President-elect Trump.
Often lost in the conversation of habitat loss and rising seas is the major impact that climate change will have on human health. Making health a central focus of all climate change policies, programs and planning can shift attention to widely-shared concerns and values. President-elect Trump’s administration must reset the climate change discussion away from a debate between believers and doubters and toward action in the face of new and uncertain threats.
As noted, the health sector has a major role to play in reframing the problem. However, the administration must use all its tools — appointments, directed funding, convening power and most of all, presidential leadership — to heighten public awareness, facilitate interagency and international cooperation, engage all stakeholders and press for urgent and effective action to anticipate and address the health risks associated with a warming planet.
We offer three recommendations:
1. Recognizing that climate change is central to global health security, create the President’s Emergency Response to Climate Change (PERCC) within the U.S. State Department to highlight the need for climate diplomacy and security. Climate change is central to every dimension of national and international security: health, economic and military. The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), similarly placed in the State Department in 2003, saved millions of lives and led to broad health gains across affected countries. President-elect Trump’s administration should create a 10-year, $90-billion global initiative to meet climate change challenges to health.
This initiative should:
- Establish a strong global surveillance system, developing new early-warning tools, linking existing networks, making data widely available, and platforms to share results.
- Invest in international research, development and demonstration to advance adaptations to climate change and deepen knowledge on the co-benefits of integrating climate science and health science.
- Strengthen preparedness and resilience in all health systems. Current readiness is inadequate. New technical and organizational structures must integrate across fields, using networked coordination and systems thinking.
- Evaluate and encourage development of co-benefits, investing in technology, products and services that reduce climate change and improve health.
- Strengthen resilience in low- and middle-income countries through technical support, collaboration and innovative financing for efforts toward improved surveillance, mitigation and adaptation, especially in geographies already heavily affected by climate change.
2. Invoke health to catalyze movement on climate change. Invest in resilient healthcare systems, in “green hospital” initiatives, and in health professionals as movement builders. Position hospitals as anchors to prepare communities to withstand the shocks of climate change. Engage the public on the health benefits of slowing climate change. Support action by state and local governments, emphasizing innovation and rapid response. Engage stakeholders at all levels, especially vulnerable populations.
3. Prioritize clean energy. Reduced reliance on fossil fuels is essential preventive medicine. Premature deaths from outdoor air pollution are set to rise from 3- to 4.5-million by 2040. Business as usual may, by century’s end, be catastrophic for human health. The US should phase out coal-fired power plants in 10 years, price other fossil fuels to reflect true costs, and intensify climate change diplomacy promoting health equity around the world.
As this century unfolds, the strength of our resolve and consequences of our actions will become evident. No one who has studied these issues seriously and objectively denies that climate change is already here and portends a global future of widespread upheaval. We face formidable obstacles in the political and economic structure of the problem, and in the reality that climate disruption is inflicting the greatest suffering on those least responsible for causing it, least equipped to adapt, least able to resist the powerful forces of the status quo. If ever there was a moment in history for inspired presidential leadership, if ever there was an issue worthy of a leader’s best effort, this is the moment and this is the issue. Time is short, but it may not be too late to make all the difference.
