Climate change and health: Risks and inequities

Introduction Human-induced climate change will affect everyone, mostly adversely. It will have greatest, and generally earliest, impact on the poorest and most disadvantaged populations on the planet. The emerging disruption to key life-supporting environmental systems, caused by climate change, has been mostly generated by a small fraction of modern society. It is one of the biggest ethical issues and challenges of our time. Climate change – itself a product of great inter-nation disparities in economic status and power and thus associated with profound global social inequities – looks likely to worsen those inequities. More generally it will likely exacerbate existing health inequities within all countries. This chapter describes the main dimensions of inequity concerning climate change and health, and the implications for policy. Inequities exist on several main axes. There are the underlying inequities in the negotiated international agreements for schedules of greenhouse gas emissions reduction (e.g. the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and its emerging successor). There are inequities in relation to the health impacts of climate change, both because of the accompanying inversely related history of national emissions and because the absolute increments of disease burdens and premature deaths will directly reflect the pre-existing levels of poor health in climate-vulnerable populations – much of which would by now, in a fairer world, have been reduced (including via the Millennium Development Goals program).