Climate Knowledge for Global Health Meeting
Jeffrey Sachs gives opening remarks at climate-health meeting. Photo: Gion
The theme of this year's World Health Day is "protecting health from climate change". In support of this, the IRI helped convene more than 70 high level experts from public health agencies, private institutions and corporations to brainstorm ways to overcome the challenges climate change poses to global health. Participants recognized that the breadth and severity of these impacts remain largely unknown and understudied, and they proposed a number of possible actions to take. The meeting was hosted by Jeffrey Sachs, the Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and was organized by The International Research Institute for Climate and Society and The Center for Global Health and Economic Development. (To see the meeting's agenda, participant list and featured presentations, please scroll to the end of this story.) "What we are trying to do with the incredible leadership assembled here is talk about creating a more integrated and sustained intellectual agenda on the intersection of climate and health, and what this means for public policy, research, and adaptation strategies," Sachs said in his opening remarks. Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and current director of Realizing Rights, put forward the notion that climate change must be fundamentally understood as an ethical issue and that the need to address it presents a unique combination of ethical and practical challenges. "Access to a functioning health system has been acknowledged as a fundamental human right," she said. "To guarantee this right, we must therefore be interested in how governments intervene in matters of health." "I think one of the big gaps at the moment is particularly the poorest countries' capacity to address this issue. They're already struggling to strengthen their health systems, and they're going to be facing severe and complex challenges from climate change," she said. Paulo Teixeira, an official from the Pan American Health Organization, echoed this sentiment. "The capacity of ministries of health and other national institutions to address the impacts of climate on health isn't keeping up with increases in populations and national budgets in our region." He said they needed to be more empowered vis-a-vis human and financial resources as well as cooperative governmental policies. Private institutions may also need to shift resources to help fill gaps in knowledge about climate-health interactions. Such understanding, said Alice Dautry, is needed across the range of both chronic and infectious diseases. Dautry is the director of the Institut Pasteur, one of the world's largest health research organizations. By the end of a day's worth of presentations and ensuing discussions, participants had identified a set of key areas they felt needed developing in order for climate change to be adequately factored in global-public-health policy planning and practice. Among them, the need for more and better climate information tailored to the requirements of health, agriculture and other sectors. "This type of information, which includes forecasts, models and satellite data, can help mitigate risks as well as take advantage of opportunities across a range of decision-making time scales, from seasons to decades," said IRI director, Stephen E. Zebiak, who gave the first presentation of the meeting. "But climate information in its raw form is useless. We can't just produce it and hand it over. We need to first identify the needs of the sector, to understand the context and learn how to feed the information in the right way to move forward the decision-making process," he said. Sara Sievers, a senior program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, agreed, noting that innovations won't be effective unless they trickle down to the people on the ground or are driven by real needs and demands. "There are research questions policy makers are desperately looking for answers on. Researchers need to find their local partners at the outset because policy makers go to them first to see what actions to take." Madeleine Thomson noted that malaria, meningitis and many other infectious diseases are climate-sensitive and that climate information can been used to improve the outcomes of mass health interventions. "We can use it to help our partners identify populations most at risk, predict epidemics and assess the impacts of the interventions themselves," she said during her presentation. Thomson, who runs both the Africa and Health programs at the IRI, also suggested that building the health community's capacity to use climate information would also improve its capacity to understand the underlying mechanisms of diseases. Another priority area identified by the participants was the need to share knowledge, good practice and policy in order to get a better understanding of what is and isn't effective. "One way is to look for and package success stories--where have countries, through intersectorial cooperation made the best use of climate in health policy?" said Chad Gardner, an advisor to the World Health Organization. IRI's Molly Hellmuth agreed, and noted how the first issue of the Climate and Society Series tried to do just that. It details five case studies in Africa where climate-risk-management practices were shown to be effective in disaster-risk reduction and development activities. "Documenting what has and hasn't worked gives us a way forward on how to tackle some of these climate-related challenges," said Hellmuth. By the meeting's end, participants had agreed on a number of immediate actions that could be taken, including:
Jeffrey Sachs concluded the meeting by inviting the participants to join a virtual network, based on email correspondence and ultimately a web site, to share resources and links with the goal of creating a road map that builds on the expertise and knowledge of core individuals and key institutions represented. Relevant Links About the IRI
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