Climate change should now be treated as a global health emergency comparable to Ebola and mpox, European ministers and health officials have told the WHO.
The Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, an independent group of experts convened by former Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir and WHO Europe chief Hans Kluge, urged governments to speed the shift to clean renewables to help avert millions of deaths in a new report.
The group said the WHO should declare the climate crisis a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC), a high-level alert most recently activated for the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as for mpox.
The experts said the move was critical since even temperate European countries are warming rapidly, driven largely by fossil fuel combustion. According to the report, fossil fuel subsidies in 12 European countries amounted to more than 10% of their public health budgets.
Kluge, who supported the call, said that “climate change is a security threat, a health emergency and an economic time bomb, all rolled into one.”
He previously told Euractiv that climate change will have to become a much bigger priority for the European region, explaining that “for the first time in history, Iceland has mosquitoes.”
The experts pointed to several health concerns linked to climate change in the report: extreme heat, vector-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya, air pollution-related deaths, and water contamination from flooding.
The experts’ prognosis was not entirely grim, however, adding that there’s still a window of time to act.
For healthcare systems, they suggested setting up greener procurement standards to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint, creating more resilient systems to shocks like floods, as well as training staff around climate awareness.
EU governments, on top of phasing out fossil fuel use, should invest in public transit, create more low-emission zones, and switch away from resource-heavy red meat consumption, they added.
The bloc’s recent progress has fallen short of both UN climate targets and its own ambitions. Most countries are still far from reaching tougher pollution targets by 2030 under the bloc’s revised air quality rules.
The European Environment Agency (EEA) estimates that air pollution is behind around 350,000 deaths in Europe every year.
EU officials are currently in Geneva for the WHO’s annual assembly, where the commission launched its report.
Hellbound and Down 