COP27 Climate Change Conference: Urgent action needed for Africa and the world

The North-South Gap on the Response to Climate Change Climate change has imposed an unprecedented threat to human security. The Bali Road Map (which includes the Bali Action Plan), adopted at the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2007, points out that the evidence of warming of the climate system is unequivocal. Therefore, the Road Map urges immediate global actions to reverse the current trend in climate change because any delay in doing so significantly ... increases the risk of more severe climate change impacts. (1) Despite growing global convergence on the urgency for actions on the climate change issue, there is substantial divergence, especially between the developed (North) and developing (South) countries, on how concrete actions--from emission standards to allocation targets, from financial arrangements to technology transfer, from industrial models to market development, and from adaptation plans to preservation of ecological systems--need to be taken to deal with this exacerbating problem. Beneath these differences are not only varied perceptions and explanations of the causes, and hence responsibility for climate change, but also substantial conflicts of interest caused by the gap between the North and South in socioeconomic development. Developing countries, including fast-developing China and India, believe the countries (particularly, the United States) must shoulder the major responsibility in reversing climate change not only because of their lion's share in energy consumption, but because the postindustrialized, developed countries are for the majority of carbon dioxide emissions since the dawn of industrialization. The South insists that the developed countries, given their predominance in technology, finance, and capacity for research and development, should provide assistance instead of shifting responsibility to the developing countries in the effort to improve the climate system. Although the dramatic increase in carbon emissions in the developing countries is hardly defensible, the Southern countries' demand that the North take major responsibility in addressing the climate change issue (e.g., adopting a higher emission standard, equitable allocation of carbon emissions, providing more financial and technical assistance, and changing lifestyles) is morally and economically justified in terms of poverty eradication and human development. The North holds the viewpoint that the developed countries (especially, the European Union and Japan) have endeavored to contain climate change, resulting in remarkable improvement not only in energy efficiency (their energy consumption per capita is over three times above the average in developing countries), but also in the ecological systems in their economies. Moreover, policy initiatives and increasing commitment by the North have helped generate global momentum to reverse (or, at least, contain) climate change. As the emerging economic powers, especially China, are becoming the leading carbon emitters, there is a growing concern and anxiety that rapid development in these countries will further exacerbate the already endangered climate system. The North is urging the South (particularly, China and India) to be responsible stakeholders in the global effort to improve the climate system. The difference between North and South on the climate change issue reflects a fundamental dilemma in the South's effort to achieve economic modernization, which is an inalienable goal, if not right, for human development. Because industrialization has been the only way for a human society to achieve this goal effectively, virtually all developing countries have embarked on the same Northern path in their efforts to modernize their societies and economies. While the developed countries are trying to upgrade their industries to become high tech, high value added, and consume less energy, the irony is that high energy-consumption but (usually) low value-added manufacturing and processing industries have been outsourced to developing countries and are a dominant force in their economic development. …

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Wealthy nations must step up support for Africa and vulnerable countries in addressing past, present, and future impacts of climate change.

<p>Climate change is arguably the most pressing environmental issue of our time. Human behaviour has progressively worsened climate change to the point where urgent action is required, and order to achieve climate change action, individuals need to be engaged with climate change. However, there is a clear disconnect between climate change engagement and climate change action and behaviour change. This disconnection is of particular interest in Aotearoa, where reductions in emission have faced a complex history and a multitude of setbacks. One of the key barriers to engagement is the science-action gap, wherein individuals receive information about the issue of climate change, but this information does not result in the desired behaviour change or action. Therefore, it is necessary to assess how the information is communicated and whether this can influence engagement. The effectiveness of climate change communication presents a clear barrier to engagement. In an attempt to influence engagement via climate change communication, there is a growing body of research that investigates the way climate change communication is framed. Although this area of research is growing, the research on message framing in the context of Aotearoa is lacking. This research investigated what types of message framing are effective for communicating climate change issues to the public of Te Tai Tokerau, focusing specifically on the relationship between climate change and droughts. This research examined the effectiveness of two commonly used communication tactics: outcome framing and risk framing. The results of this research indicate that the framing of a message about climate change and drought in Te Tai Tokerau did not influence people’s levels of engagement with climate change. Specifically, there was no significant difference between the effectiveness of gain framed messages and loss framed messages; nor was there a significant difference between the high risk framed messages and the low risk messages.</p>

COP27 Climate Change Conference: Urgent action needed for Africa and the world.

Wealthy nations must step up support for Africa and vulnerable countries in addressing past, present and future impacts of climate change. The 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) paints a dark picture of the future of life on earth, characterised by ecosystem collapse, species extinction, and climate hazards such as heatwaves and floods.1 These are all linked to physical and mental health problems, with direct and indirect consequences of increased morbidity and mortality. To avoid these catastrophic health effects across all regions of the globe, there is broad agreement—as 231 health journals argued together in 2021—that the rise in global temperature must be limited to less than 1.5°C compared with pre-industrial levels. While the Paris Agreement of 2015 outlines a global action framework that incorporates providing climate finance to developing countries, this support has yet to materialise.2 COP27 is the fifth Conference of the Parties (COP) to be organised in Africa since its inception in 1995. Ahead of this meeting, we—as health journal editors from across the continent—call for urgent action to ensure it is the COP that finally delivers climate justice for Africa and vulnerable countries. This is essential not just for the health of those countries, but for the health of the whole world. The climate crisis has had an impact on the environmental and social determinants of health across Africa, leading to devastating health effects.3 Impacts on health can result directly from environmental shocks and indirectly through socially mediated effects.4 Climate change-related risks in Africa include flooding, drought, heatwaves, reduced food production, and reduced labour productivity.5 Droughts in sub-Saharan Africa have tripled between 1970–79 and 2010–2019.6 In 2018, devastating cyclones impacted 2.2 million people in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.6 In west and central Africa, severe flooding resulted in mortality and forced migration from loss of shelter, cultivated land, and livestock.7 Changes in vector ecology brought about by floods and damage to environmental hygiene have led to increases in diseases across sub-Saharan Africa, with rises in malaria, dengue fever, Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever, Lyme disease, Ebola virus, West Nile virus and other infections.8, 9 Rising sea levels reduce water quality, leading to water-borne diseases, including diarrhoeal diseases, a leading cause of mortality in Africa.8 Extreme weather damages water and food supply, increasing food insecurity and malnutrition, which causes 1.7 million deaths annually in Africa.10 According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, malnutrition has increased by almost 50% since 2012, owing to the central role agriculture plays in African economies.11 Environmental shocks and their knock-on effects also cause severe harm to mental health.12 In all, it is estimated that the climate crisis has destroyed a fifth of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the countries most vulnerable to climate shocks.13 The damage to Africa should be of supreme concern to all nations. This is partly for moral reasons. It is highly unjust that the most impacted nations have contributed the least to global cumulative emissions, which are driving the climate crisis and its increasingly severe effects. North America and Europe have contributed 62% of carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution, whereas Africa has contributed only 3%.14 Yet it is not just for moral reasons that all nations should be concerned for Africa. The acute and chronic impacts of the climate crisis create problems like poverty, infectious disease, forced migration, and conflict that spread through globalised systems.6, 15 These knock-on impacts affect all nations. COVID-19 served as a wake-up call to these global dynamics and it is no coincidence that health professionals have been active in identifying and responding to the consequences of growing systemic risks to health. But the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic should not be limited to pandemic risk.16, 17 Instead, it is imperative that the suffering of frontline nations, including those in Africa, be the core consideration at COP27: in an interconnected world, leaving countries to the mercy of environmental shocks creates instability that has severe consequences for all nations. The primary focus of climate summits remains to rapidly reduce emissions so that global temperature rises are kept to below 1.5°C. This will limit the harm. But, for Africa and other vulnerable regions, this harm is already severe. Achieving the promised target of providing $100bn of climate finance a year is now globally critical if we are to forestall the systemic risks of leaving societies in crisis. This can be done by ensuring these resources focus on increasing resilience to the existing and inevitable future impacts of the climate crisis, as well as on supporting vulnerable nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions: a parity of esteem between adaptation and mitigation. These resources should come through grants not loans, and be urgently scaled up before the current review period of 2025. They must put health system resilience at the forefront, as the compounding crises caused by the climate crisis often manifest in acute health problems. Financing adaptation will be more cost-effective than relying on disaster relief. Some progress has been made on adaptation in Africa and around the world, including early warning systems and infrastructure to defend against extremes. But frontline nations are not compensated for impacts from a crisis they did not cause. This is not only unfair, but also drives the spiral of global destabilisation, as nations pour money into responding to disasters, but can no longer afford to pay for greater resilience or to reduce the root problem through emissions reductions. A financing facility for loss and damage must now be introduced, providing additional resources beyond those given for mitigation and adaptation. This must go beyond the failures of COP26 where the suggestion of such a facility was downgraded to “a dialogue”.18 The climate crisis is a product of global inaction, and comes at great cost not only to disproportionately impacted African countries, but to the whole world. Africa is united with other frontline regions in urging wealthy nations to finally step up, if for no other reason than that the crises in Africa will sooner rather than later spread and engulf all corners of the globe, by which time it may be too late to effectively respond. If so far they have failed to be persuaded by moral arguments, then hopefully their self-interest will now prevail. This Comment is being published simultaneously in multiple journals. For the full list of journals see: https://www.bmj.com/content/full-list-authors-and-signatories-climate-emergency-editorial-october-2022 In the interest of transparency the authors wish to declare the following roles and relationships: James Kigera is the Ex-Officio, President and Secretary of the Kenya Orthopedic Association; Paul Yonga been paid to speak or participate at events by Novartis, bioMerieux and Pfizer; Chris Zielinski is a paid consultant for the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change; Joy Muhia is an unpaid board member of the International Working Group for Health systems strengthening; David Ofori-Adjei has a relationship with GLICO Healthcare Ltd. The authors declare no further conflicts of interest beyond those inherent in the editorial roles listed above.

Climate change is a major threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services. We analyzed current policies and measures relating to biodiversity adaptation to climate change in some of the most developed countries and developing mega-biodiversity countries. Some governments recognize the great importance and urgency of action on biodiversity adaptation and have released national strategies. The most popular approach is an ecosystem-based adaptation approach, embodied by measures such as increasing landscape connectivity as well as improving management and restoration of existing protected areas to achieve higher resilience. Most governments consider climate change and its impacts on biodiversity an interdisciplinary topic, which needs continual, collaborative monitoring. Addressing the impacts of climate change also requires an assessment of the vulnerability of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. The establishment of high-level coordination mechanisms coupled with sufficient funding is required to fully implement adaptation policies and measures. Based on these foreign experiences and current progress in China, we hereby propose the following suggestions: (1) highlight the crucial importance of a biodiversity and a well-adapted ecosystem while enabling society to adapt to climate change; (2) improve capability of integrated management of protected areas to build biodiversity and ecosystem resilience; (3) integrate comprehensive monitoring network and conduct regular and continuing assessment of the vulnerability of biodiversity to climate change in China.

Title: Applying Illness Scripts Theory to Climate Health Equity: Design and Pilot Evaluation of a Multi-Residency Educational Symposium Background: Defining climate change is key to understanding its long-lasting impacts and the urgency for action. Climate change encompasses the natural and primarily human-driven processes resulting in vast changes to the environment which indirectly and directly impact human health and disease, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations. While climate change continues to be touted as a public health crisis, much of the ground-level work for tackling the issue remains. Medical education is key to amplifying efforts for change and resulting in a paradigm shift in human health and disease. As physicians, we can bring about sustainability in these efforts by redesigning medical education to seamlessly implement the processes and impacts of climate change in the common framework of “illness scripts” which are used to teach and learn about various medical conditions. Methods: The purpose of this study was to pilot an educational intervention and evaluate its effectiveness aimed at incorporating the use of newly adapted illness scripts for common medical conditions with a climate health and equity lens. The intervention was a multi-residency half-day symposium for Family Medicine and Emergency Medicine residents in San Diego, CA developed via the collective expertise of Primary Care, Emergency Medicine, Pediatric, and OBGYN physicians. The symposium consisted of interactive breakout sessions focused on the climate health impacts on various cardiac, respiratory, obstetric, and mental health conditions followed by large group sessions centered on health advocacy. Results: The symposium was attended by 92 resident and faculty physicians, of which 46 completed the pre-intervention survey and 29 completed the post-intervention survey. Survey participants reported a statistically significant difference in their knowledge and skills pre- and post-attendance of the symposium (p-value <0.001). Conclusion: A multi-residency symposium leveraging the collective expertise of local physicians and the application of illness scripts is a potential educational strategy to educate physicians about climate health. While the concept of integration of climate health into medical education is not novel, the use of illness scripts, which are known to improve clinical reasoning and application of new knowledge to clinical problems, to accomplish this has not been studied or implemented to the best of our knowledge.

Climate change is arguably the greatest threat to population health worldwide. Urgent action is needed to mitigate and adapt to the impacts. National public health institutes (NPHIs) are key actors in preventing illness and improving the health and wellbeing of their populations. They therefore have a crucial role to play in addressing climate change and making it central to their agendas. They can contribute to a better understanding of how climate change affects health, translate this knowledge into policy advice, and identify health co-benefits and possible harms of mitigation and adaptation measures to support the implementation of healthy measures within and beyond the health sector. NPHIs are also responsible for reducing their own footprint through “greening” and can role model and support other organisations in this regard. The International Association of National Public Health Institutes (IANPHI) recognises the threat that climate change poses and, to this end, published the “IANPHI Roadmap for Action on Health and Climate Change” in November 2021. This roadmap highlights the essential role of NPHIs’ as “key climate actors”. NPHIs are at different stages of progress on climate change and health, and there is therefore need and opportunity to learn from best practices and to liaise and work together to address shared challenges. It is also essential that NPHIs have an ongoing collaboration with other actors, such as academics, civil society, NGOs and other non-state actors, within and beyond the health sector, in order to learn from other perspectives and sources of knowledge and to ensure coherence and joint action on climate change and health across the system. This workshop therefore aims to promote discussion and exchange and to raise the visibility of NPHIs as key climate actors in order to strengthen their individual and shared contribution. The workshop will also ensure that the IANPHI Roadmap remains front of mind a year after publication. It will also give the opportunity to NPHIs to share their progress since then, as well as promote coherence and exchange in their continued efforts. The workshop will start with a presentation of the IANPHI Roadmap, followed by three examples from NPHIs on their progress on climate change strategy development and implementation. It will then be followed by an interactive session and discussion on NPHIs’ priorities in this area, on how NPHIs and other actors can best exchange and work together, and on how IANPHI as a global network of NPHIs can promote and support NPHI and stakeholder cooperation. The presentations are coherent together in offering the Roadmap's vision as well as a set of diverse examples that illustrate the role of NPHIs on climate change and health in practice. Key messages • Emphasis of the important role that NPHIs have in addressing climate change and health, as well as the value of their partnerships and intersectoral working, which can be supported by IANPHI. • Promotion of discussion and new ideas between the presenters and the audience on how to ensure health is at the forefront when tackling climate change.

> Wealthy nations must step up support for Africa and vulnerable countries in addressing past, present and future impacts of climate change The 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on...

Wealthy nations must step up support for Africa and vulnerable countries in addressing past, present, and future impacts of climate change. The 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a dark picture of the future of life on earth, characterised by ecosystem collapse, species extinction, and climate hazards such as heatwaves and floods.1 These are all linked to physical and mental health problems, with direct and indirect consequences of increased morbidity and mortality.

> Wealthy nations must step up support for Africa and vulnerable countries in addressing past, present and future impacts of climate change The 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on...

COP27 Climate Change Conference: urgent action needed for Africa and the world

Wealthy nations must step up support for Africa and vulnerable countries in addressing past, present and future impacts of climate change The 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) paints a dark picture of the future of life on earth, characterised by ecosystem collapse, species extinction, and climate hazards such as heatwaves and floods. [1] These are all linked to physical and mental health problems, with direct and indirect consequences of increased morbidity and mortality. To avoid these catastrophic health effects across all regions of the globe, there is broad agreement—as 231 health journals argued together in 2021— that the rise in global temperature must be limited to less than 1.5 oC compared with pre-industrial levels. While the Paris Agreement of 2015 outlines a global action framework that incorporates providing climate finance to developing countries, this support has yet to materialise. [2] COP27 is the fifth Conference of the Parties (COP) to be organised in Africa since its inception in 1995. Ahead of this meeting, we—as health journal editors from across the continent—call for urgent action to ensure it is the COP that finally delivers climate justice for Africa and vulnerable countries. This is essential not just for the health of those countries, but for the health of the whole world. Africa Has Suffered Disproportionately Although it Has Done Little to Cause the Crisis The climate crisis has had an impact on the environmental and social determinants of health across Africa, leading to devastating health effects.[3] Impacts on health can result directly from environmental shocks and indirectly through socially mediated effects.[4] Climate change-related risks in Africa include flooding, drought, heatwaves, reduced food production, and reduced labour productivity.[5] Droughts in sub-Saharan Africa have tripled between 1970-79 and 2010-2019.[6] In 2018, devastating cyclones impacted three million people in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.[6] In west and central Africa, severe flooding resulted in mortality and forced migration from loss of shelter, cultivated land, and livestock.[7] Changes in vector