For Week 7’s Tuesday Talk, we learnt from Professor Elizabeth Robinson (Director of the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute) about the many ways that climate change is harming human health. She shared clear examples from around the world and gave us a big question to answer – but more on that later.
Climate change is a lose-lose situation
Professor Robinson doesn’t shy away from global challenges, even if they’re as big as environmental change and health. While living with her family in China, she noted that something didn’t make sense. Severe air pollution was harming the health of everyone there, especially people experiencing poverty, and it was also contributing to climate change. It was a lose-lose situation.
She returned to the UK and now works to improve global health through climate action. Her reminder to us? Though big ideas and theory matter, we must find ways of tackling climate change in the real world.
She noted that the science behind environmental change is settled, as are most of the economics behind solutions like Net Zero. But the ongoing challenge is getting industries and governments to act. So, global health could be an effective entry point.
How does it link to global health?
The climate crisis brings bigger and more frequent heatwaves, fires, droughts, floods, pollution, loss of biodiversity, and more. In turn, these cause global health crises such as death, food shortages, heart and lung diseases, illnesses like malaria, and so on.
Her work now relies on vast amounts of data, which she uses to accurately model current health impacts, as well as what will happen if we don’t stop climate change. She helped us understand that reducing emissions helps every human on the planet, and that the health benefits are a national public good. So, let’s take care of people by tackling climate change!
What would we do as global dictators?
With all this knowledge, we were then asked: what would we do to solve climate change immediately if we were global dictators? Over our dinner discussion, we came up with some very concrete and some very fantastical ideas. Suggestions included:
- Banning all forms of technology, shifting the world back 2,000 years and rebuilding the Roman Empire, effectively cutting carbon emissions to near zero!
- Requiring all new data centres to be run on renewable energy.
- Creating a vaccine that would force everyone to be empathetic and kind, making powerful and extremely wealthy people suddenly do the ‘right thing’.
We dreamed big, but the main takeaway was that climate change affects everything, including human health. So, here’s to pushing for global change for global benefit!
