TORONTO – As global leaders prepare to meet for the first dedicated health day at a UN climate summit, Canadian doctors decides to use the platform to push for a new federal office dedicated, to talk about the health effects of climate change.
The president of a major national physicians group says, that a summer of record-breaking heat and air-polluting wildfires drove home the urgent need for decision-makers to organize a pan-Canadian response.
Dr. Kathleen Ross, president of the Canadian Medical Association says, a proposed national that is climate and health secretariat, would work across governments to chart a course to a climate-resilient and low-carbon health-care system.
We realized that the solution to our climate crisis isn’t uniquely poised in just one silo of the government, said Ross.
We will mark the first time a UN climate summit, known this year as COP28 and will dedicate a day to explore the connections between health and climate change, which the World Health Organization considered it as the greatest health risk of the 21st century.
Climate scientists and doctors say that Canada has already seen harrowing examples of how a warming world will affect health care.
More than 600 individuals died, heat-related deaths under British Columbia’s 2021 heat dome. Unprecedented wildfires this summer choked the air with pollutants, pausing school activities and creating heightened risks for individuals with heart diseases and asthma.
Yellowknife’s hospital, and the rest of the city, was evacuated under threat of encroaching flames. The most important treatment is phasing out fossil fuels said Howard.
Framing the climate crisis and also the health-care crisis, completely changes the stakes of the issue. It makes tangible climate change’s far-reaching and direct effects on human health; from the food we consume to the air we breathe.
I also have a responsibility to advocate for health public policy on behalf of my patient population, which, given that I serve a vulnerable patient population and one of the most rapidly warming places in the world, very much foregrounds climate change for me, said Howard.
But Canada needs to do more to make sure its health-care system isn’t worsening the problem, Howard said. While the federal government signed on at COP26 two years in Glasgow to a pledge to develop a low-carbon and resilient health-care system.
We don’t even have official stats on where we’re at right now in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, let alone a plan to get us to net-zero, she said.
Other countries are very much, not only getting ahead in terms of their plan, but they’re beginning to steal our people because we don’t have a plan and we don’t have jobs for them.
The health-care sector is estimated to account for about four per cent of Canada’s total emissions. Health-care leaders have looked to build from more energy-efficient hospitals, bring in virtual-care options to lessen transportation emissions and electrify ambulances. Doctors are also finding out ways to cut the use of single-use plastics and what types of drugs to recommend.
Some inhalers, which are often in high demand during air-polluting wildfire events, use potent greenhouse gases to propel the drug into the lungs, spurring efforts to prescribe low-carbon alternatives.
Doctors also stress that, climate change is worsening health-care inequities, from food security effects in remote Indigenous communities to extreme heat effects on homeless populations.
It’s also individuals who are living in poverty and can’t afford an air conditioner or perhaps can’t afford to run their air conditioner because of the cost of electricity, said Dr. Green, a physician working in Toronto’s downtown Regent Park.
Its people who are living in dense, usually racialized neighborhoods which lack adequate tree cover — and in these urban heat islands, temperatures can be up to 12 degrees hotter than surrounding neighborhoods.
Green says, that another overlooked health implication of climate change, is that it has many effects on mental health. Climate change anxiety rates, especially among young individuals, are on the rise and studies have noted high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder among survivors of climate-driven disasters.
Green says though she supports the idea of a climate and health secretariat, she hopes that the idea doesn’t overshadow the fundamental importance of phasing out fossil fuels at the COP28 conference.
