At last week’s World Health Assembly, 194 World Health Organization (WHO) member states adopted the landmark Climate Change and Health resolution. The resolution highlights the increasing recognition of climate change as a major threat to global public health and elevates climate mitigation and adaptation to public health priorities. This outcome is a result of years of efforts by civil society and WHO leadership. Crucially, it enables WHO and the global health community to tackle the climate crisis more effectively, working closely with the UNFCCC and building on the COP28 UAE Declaration on Climate and Health.
The resolution calls out the many ways climate change affects health, including through increasing food insecurity, air pollution and infectious diseases. It also sets a framework for promoting health and building climate-resilient and sustainable health systems. The resolution tasks governments to take rapid action for a “health-in-all policies approach, without diverting resources meant for primary health care.” They must assess national vulnerabilities, develop adaptation plans, and integrate climate data into early warning systems.
However, the resolution has some glaring gaps. It fails to explicitly mention the role of fossil fuels in driving the climate crisis or the need for a just transition to renewable energy. It also falls short of addressing gender-responsive climate action, health systems and health services, sexual and reproductive health and rights issues, and the needs of marginalised populations like children and youth, older people, LGBTQIA, and refugees.
The resolution was adopted less than six months after the launch of the COP28 UAE Declaration on Health and Climate Change, which was accompanied by governments making big promises. As Parties begin the next two weeks of negotiations in Bonn, they have the opportunity to begin translating rhetoric to reality. Mere words cannot protect people’s lives from the threat of climate change. Lives can only be protected when health is embedded into UNFCCC negotiations across adaptation, loss and damage, just transitions, agriculture and beyond — and when governments truly commit to implementing them. For this to happen, governments need to collaborate across WHO and UNFCCC processes, across environment and health ministries at national level, and together with civil society. Lastly, countries need to pay the bill. Because without adequate finance for climate — through an ambitious New Collective Quantified Goal — and for health, any promises to protect the planet and its people will remain purely tokenistic.