November 2023 Climate & Health Updates

With COP28, the UN’s Climate Change Conference, now days away, November was a big month for major climate publication updates. The Lancet put out their always highly anticipated 8th annual report on climate and health. The US Global Research Program released their 5th National Assessment of climate in the US (with a chapter on health). And, in my own state, Massachusetts also released a major report featuring recommendations from Climate Chief Melissa Hoffer, which I’m including here because I think it’s interesting to see how these conversations flow from the global to national to state levels. 

Here are quick overviews of the two major reports, which of course I’d encourage you to at least click into and orient yourselves to:

The Lancet: The 2023 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: the imperative for a health-centred response in a world facing irreversible harms [Link]

A global policy-oriented report citing 114 scientists, covering tremendously broad ground. While the report advocates for the role of health professionals in this broader conversation, the crux of the report is informing the broader global policy conversation around health equity, funding, and the use of fossil fuels. The report both celebrates the increasing references to health linkages in climate efforts - and raises the flag that this could easily become ‘healthwashing,’ if health is used “to increase the acceptability of initiatives that minimally advance action.”

The Lancet is particularly known for its work to create and report on a globally-oriented data set showing comparisons across countries year-over-year. It’s a massive undertaking and while the data isn’t perfect, there’s no other view like it. Panel 3 on Page 8 gives the measure overview — when I first dove into this topic, I remember finding this measure list to be a helpful way to conceptualize the broad range of ways that climate and health intersect.

US Global Change Research Program: 5th National Climate Assessment [Link]

This is a US-domestic assessment report led by a federal steering committee with reps from many agencies, with technical support/leadership from NOAA. Chapter 15, on Climate and Health, is chaired by the CDC’s Paul Schramm. This is a very broad-ranging report as well, but by comparison to the Lancet’s global comparisons, the USGCR report focuses on regional assessments of impacts as well as cross-cutting thematic assessments (health, infrastructure) — critical because climate impacts are so variable by location. This report is a visual experience, which I was very much not expecting — but I thought was a really creative way to engage community in both creating the report and hopefully getting messages to new audiences. A poem from Ada Limon, Poet Laureate, sets off the conversation (see below) and there’s an extensive Art x Climate exhibit. Moreover, the chapters are visually oriented around a few key messages with visuals to tell those stories.

STARTLEMENT

by Ada Limón, 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress

It is a forgotten pleasure,
the pleasureof the unexpected blue-bellied lizard

skittering off his sun spot rock,
the flicker of an unknown bird by the bus stop.

To think, perhaps, we are not distinguishable
and therefore no loneliness can exist here.

Species to species in the same blue air, smoke—
wing flutter buzzing, a car horn coming.

So many unknown languages, to think we have
only honored this strange human tongue.

If you sit by the riverside, you see a culmination
of all things upstream. We know now,

we were never at the circle’s center, instead
all around us something is living or trying to live.

The world says, What we are becoming, we are
becoming together.

The world says, One type of dream has ended
and another has just begun.

The world says, Once we were separate,
and now we must move in unison.

What can you take away?

In the collective hundreds of pages, the bottom lines are pretty similar: climate is impacting health, we need to mitigate and adapt, the impacts of climate and health are not proportionate (whether we’re looking at impacts on nations or within our own country, equity is always a factor), and while there is still more work to do to research interventions and impacts, the barrier right now is funding and aligned policy to get started on the things that we know today will work.

I got the sense in reading these that the authors are just bursting with ideas they want to put into effect, but can’t….yet.