At first-ever health day at UN climate summit, Canadian doctors push for action | CityNews Calgary

As international leaders put together to satisfy for the primary devoted well being day at a UN local weather summit, Canadian docs plan to make use of the platform to push for a brand new federal workplace devoted to addressing the well being results of local weather change.

The president of a significant nationwide physicians group says a summer time of record-breaking warmth and air-polluting wildfires drove house the pressing want for decision-makers to prepare a pan-Canadian response.

A proposed nationwide “climate and health secretariat” would work throughout governments to chart a course to a climate-resilient and low-carbon health-care system, stated Dr. Kathleen Ross, president of the Canadian Medical Association.

“We recognize that the solution to our climate crisis isn’t uniquely poised in just one silo of the government,” stated Ross.

Sunday will mark the primary time a UN local weather summit, identified this yr as COP28, will dedicate a day to exploring the hyperlinks between well being and local weather change, which the World Health Organization labelled the best well being threat of the twenty first century.

“Climate change is really a health threat multiplier, and I think that’s the message we need to bring,” stated Ross, who’s attending COP28.

Doctors and local weather scientists say Canada has already seen harrowing examples of how a warming world will have an effect on well being care.

More than 600 folks died heat-related deaths beneath British Columbia’s 2021 warmth dome. Unprecedented wildfires this summer time choked the air with pollution, pausing faculty actions and creating heightened dangers for folks with bronchial asthma and coronary heart illness. Yellowknife’s hospital, together with the remainder of town, was evacuated beneath menace of encroaching flames.

If the planet have been a affected person, Dr. Courtney Howard says she can be transferring it to the trauma room.

“Phasing out fossil fuels is the most important treatment,” stated Howard, an emergency doctor in Yellowknife who can be the top of the International Society of Doctors for the Environment’s delegation to COP28.

Framing the local weather disaster as additionally a health-care disaster “completely changes the stakes” of the problem, stated Howard. It makes tangible local weather change’s far-reaching and direct results on human well being, from the meals we eat to the air we breathe, she stated.

“I also have an obligation and 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,” stated Howard.

But Canada must do extra to verify its health-care system isn’t exacerbating the issue, Howard stated. While the federal authorities signed on at COP26 two years in Glasgow to a pledge to develop a low-carbon and resilient health-care system, Howard stated, “we have barely got started on implementing it.”

“We don’t even really 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 stated.

“Other countries are very much, not only getting ahead in terms of their plan, but they’re starting 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 4 per cent of Canada’s whole emissions. Health-care leaders have seemed to construct from extra energy-efficient hospitals, usher in virtual-care choices to cut back transportation emissions and electrify ambulances. Doctors are additionally taking a look at tips on how to lower using single-use plastics and what varieties of medication to prescribe.

Some inhalers, for instance, which are sometimes in excessive demand throughout air-polluting wildfire occasions, use potent greenhouse gases to propel the drug into the lungs, spurring efforts to prescribe low-carbon options.

Part of the answer can be higher training for folks in well being care, stated Howard. She plans to make use of her time at COP28 to get extra docs, nurses and organizations signed onto a pledge to enhance local weather change training throughout the medical occupation.

“This is also on us as health-care practitioners to lead by example and to learn,” stated Howard.

Doctors additionally stress local weather change is exacerbating health-care inequities, from meals safety results in distant Indigenous communities to excessive warmth results on homeless populations.

“It’s also people who are living in poverty and maybe can’t afford an air conditioner or perhaps can’t afford to run their air conditioner because of the cost of electricity,” stated Dr. Samantha Green, a household doctor working in Toronto’s downtown Regent Park neighbourhood and the president-elect of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

“It’s people who are living in dense, usually racialized neighbourhoods which lack adequate tree cover — and in these urban heat islands, temperatures can be up to 12 degrees hotter than surrounding neighbourhoods.”

Another neglected well being implication of local weather change, stated Green, is its many results on psychological well being. Climate change anxiousness charges, particularly amongst younger folks, are on the rise and research have famous elevated charges of post-traumatic stress dysfunction amongst survivors of climate-driven disasters.

Green says whereas she helps the thought of a local weather and well being secretariat, she hopes the thought doesn’t “overshadow the fundamental importance of … phasing out fossil fuels” on the COP28 convention.

“That’s the most important action that Canada can take.”