Climate change is now the biggest concern facing health ministers in Commonwealth countries, the organisation’s secretary-general has warned.
Patricia Scotland said it was a “reality today” rather than a problem of the future, with impacts such as heat stress and increases in insect-borne diseases particularly acute in smaller states.
“If you look at what’s happening in zoonotic diseases, if you look at what’s changing in terms of malaria, a lot of dengue fever, chikungunya – all of this is climate-related,” she said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the climate crisis will cause about 250,000 extra deaths a year between 2030 and 2050 of malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea and heat stress alone.
Referring to the international target of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels, Lady Scotland said: “If you look at Tuvalu, we said in 2015 that it ‘1.5 to stay alive‘. It wasn’t a slogan, it was a reality [in] Tuvalu.
“We are now at 1.5 [celsius]. So every time the ministers leave Tuvalu, they are never quite confident that when they return, their island will still be there. This is not the reality of tomorrow – it is their reality today.
“It worries me beyond belief that the clock has been ticking and ticking and ticking, and it’s running out,” she added.
Born on the Caribbean island of Dominica, Scotland moved to the UK with her family and grew up in London, serving as Attorney General during the last Labor government.
She has been Secretary-General of the Commonwealth since 2016 and has a try to remove her by Boris Johnson two years ago and an earlier one media storm about a reconstruction of her residence.
Speaking at a meeting of Commonwealth health ministers in Geneva last month, during which the group committed to building climate-resilient health systems in the most vulnerable countries, Scotland listed a series of “shocks” putting pressure on the 25 placed small island developing states. (SIDS) which makes up almost half of the Commonwealth’s membership.
This includes health and economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as debt problems and food insecurity – exacerbated by the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
These factors have made it more difficult to create the kind of strong, well-staffed health systems that can be resilient in the face of the climate crisis, Scotland said.
The climate crisis was more pressing than threats from the “big killer” diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, pressures from antimicrobial resistance and the possibility of another pandemic, she said.
Commonwealth officials offer examples of climate-related health problems across the organization and say they are not limited to the poorer member states – a 2019 paper warned that Canada is likely to see more “exotic” infectious diseases as well as more cases of locally endemic diseases such as West Nile virus.
That could help spur action, Scotland said, adding: “When I became secretary-general in 2016, the problems we had were helping people understand that. [climate change] was omnipresent, was really tough.”
But she pointed to recent extreme weather in the UK and said: “Now people are just starting to get a little taste of what other people have lived through.”
The Commonwealth helped smaller member states access international funding to strengthen their health systems, Scotland said, including by improving access to digital health services for when people could not access face-to-face treatment.
The Commonwealth was also coordinating technological solutions such as high-tech mosquito surveillance devices and AI-based early warning systems for dengue outbreaks, she said.
His ministerial meeting was held just before the WHO’s World Health Assembly in Geneva, in which countries agreed that the WHO should focus on climate crisis as an increasing threat to health over the next four years.
“I’m a glass-half-full person,” Scotland added. “There’s no point in saying the world is going to end – it’s only going to end if we let it.
“And those of us who can fight must fight and we must fight now.”
