Health Day at upcoming UN climate conference

Health Day at upcoming UN climate conference

Subject :Environment 

Section: Climate change

Context: Health Day at upcoming UN climate conference — a first in COP history

More on the News:

• Finally heeding to the many versions of the ‘climate change crisis is a public health crisis’ argument made by domain experts, the upcoming 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will assess health issues in great detail.
• This reverses a historical trend of health being absent from COP discussions, despite roughly 189 million people in developing countries being affected by extreme weather events annually since 1991.
• COP28 will be the first COP to dedicate a day to health and the first to host a health and climate ministerial. And need to broaden our definition of adaptation to enable global climate resilience, transform food systems and enhance forestry land use and water management.
• The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted fissures in the health systems across the world, which will only widen as the climate change crisis worsens. A warming world will add to the existing high disease burden. This is because increased disasters like heatwaves, floods and droughts will lead to more illnesses while an increase in temperature will allow for vector-borne diseases to survive at higher latitudes and thereby impact a greater population.
• Health received some attention at COP27 held in Egypt last year when conference resolutions referred to the need for governments’ climate action to respect, promote, and consider their respective obligations on human rights, including the right to highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
• In 2021, the WHO joined hands with the United Kingdom COP26 presidency and established the Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health, which had 60 countries as signatories.

Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health

• Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health (ATACH) works to realize the ambition set at COP26 to build climate resilient and sustainable health systems, using the collective power of WHO Member States (“Member States”) and other stakeholders to drive this agenda forward at pace and scale; and promote the integration of climate change and health nexus into respective national, regional, and global plans.
• Four thematic working groups will work to address common issues:
  • Financing the Health Commitments on Climate Resilient and Sustainable Low Carbon Health Systems.
  • Climate Resilient Health Systems.
  • Low Carbon Sustainable Health Systems.
  • Supply chains.

Functions of the ATACH

• Delivering international shift on priority issues: This function focuses on areas where a global shift can be delivered through the collective power of Member States and other stakeholders, as appropriate. It reflects collective interest of the Alliance as well as context specific themes which may be more applicable to smaller groupings of Member States.
• Monitoring: Support WHO, in its efforts to collect data on country level progress against the commitments made.
• Quality Assurance: Support WHO in developing quality assurance mechanisms designed to help ensure that assessments, plans, and implementation are of the quality required to deliver on commitments made thereby facilitating a common understanding of such commitments and measures of progress. The core aim is to help identify where support is required and to identify best practice.
• Financing: This focuses on identifying financing needs, and support Member State access to finance, including climate finance, in a timely and sustainable way. This information also feeds into the monitoring function, tracking the performance of both domestic as well as donor/ development finance agencies in making funding available to meet Member State commitment needs.
• Knowledge sharing and coordinating access to technical assistance: This function provides a forum for Alliance Participants to share expertise, knowledge and experience on the assessment, planning implementation, financing, and monitoring of commitments. This supports exchange among Participants and access to information to support evidence based and cost-effective delivery of commitments.