Investing in measures to fight climate change such as heat wave warning systems can save 2 million lives a year, and their benefits can quadruple the money spent on them, the World Health Organization (WHO) said this Thursday. a few days before the Climate Change Summit in Baku (COP29) begins.
In view of this new event in the fight against global warming, the WHO has published two reports in which it also recommends the development of clean energy for domestic use or “an efficient pricing policy for fossil fuels” in order to achieve these savings. in human lives.
“In Baku we will carry the message that the climate crisis is also a health crisis, something that is already affecting us, and that combating global warming can therefore generate enormous health benefits,” the director of the Department of the Environment told EFE. , Climate Change and Health, María Neira.
The environmental fight can contribute, for example, to reducing the seven million deaths related to air pollution, Neira highlighted before presenting the WHO’s position facing Baku at a press conference.
On the other hand, “with more sustainable and less polluting transportation policies, which generated fewer accidents and less health care, we would also reduce the 1.2 million related deaths,” he stressed.
More sustainable food production systems, another aspect that can benefit the environmental fight, can not only reduce current food waste, which is close to 30% of the total generated, but also help reduce the five million deaths that have to do with unhealthy diets or malnutrition, he added.
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Fight can help reduce seven million deaths related to air pollution: WHO
The reports have been prepared by the WHO together with another hundred organizations and some 300 experts, which, according to Neira, is “a collective call from the health community” to promote greater climate action at COP29.
Health “can be the motivation needed to raise ambitions” in terms of reducing emissions, insisted the Spanish expert from the WHO, an agency that in the new reports makes a strong call for the end of subsidies for fossil fuels such as oil, coal or gas.
“Currently, the world continues to massively subsidize the consumption of these fossil energies, with amounts that are around 7 trillion dollars annually, which is equivalent to about 3,000 dollars per family on the planet,” he highlighted at a press conference to present the reports WHO expert Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum.
“By investing these resources more intelligently we could have not only a healthier planet but also a population with better health,” said the agency’s Climate Change and Health expert, recalling that the consumption of these non-renewable energies contributes to greater problems. pulmonary and cardiac, among others.
WHO Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health, Vanessa Kerry, added that “health is one of the faces of climate change and we cannot ignore it when we see the droughts in Africa, the malnutrition and the heat waves that have become in the norm or the recent floods in Valencia” (Spain).
“These events demand that we adopt urgent actions that are different from the current ones,” the daughter of US politician John Kerry said at the press conference.
With information from EFE.
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