EPHA and HEAL conference on Climate Change and Public Health

The debate over climate change has moved on from questioning whether our emissions will affect the climate to how much we need to reduce emissions and what we need to do now to adapt to a climate changing due to past emissions. Nowhere is this more important than in the public health consequences of climate change.


The Health and Environment Alliance together with EPHA organised a conference on climate change and health to highlight the public health challenges the EU will face due to climate change.

The event was timely given the previous weeks announcement that the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) is to be jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize alongside Al Gore for bringing to global attention the seriousness of the challenge climate change presents.

The conference was innovative in that it maximised the use of technology to reduce the carbon footprint of the event, with speakers using video conferencing technology to give their presentations and skype sessions to answer questions from the participants.

Speakers who took advantage of this technology and so did not fly to the event included the Director of the European Environment Agency, Jacquline McGlade, and the coordinating lead author of the IPCC reports section on health Bettina Menne of the World Health Organisation (WHO) climate change department. Further contributions from IPCC authors came from Sari Kovats of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Stephan Singer from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

This last presentation gave insights into the extent to which climate change will pose an enormous public health challenge if we are unable to prevent temperature rising less than 2°C - the EU target. If climate change is not limited to this range billions of people will face water shortages so acute as to place their lives at risk. Large scale emission reductions are therefore absolutely necessary if this public health catastrophe is to be avoided.

It was therefore apt that the conference enabled all participants insights into not just what adaptations the public health sector will need to undertake so as to respond to the changing climate, but also what the healthcare sector can do so as to reduce emissions of green house gasses. All of the presentations for the conference are now available online.

Another conference tackling this issue was held in Brussels on 22 October 2007 and was organised by the European Alliance Against Malaria and the WHO. This event looked to the health challenges climate change posses to those least able to respond and least responsible for the causing it - the poor in developing countries. Featuring further IPCC contributors in addition to those that had attended the EPHA and HEAL conference, the focus for debate was what the EU should be looking to undertake so as to aid developing countries adaptation to climate change.

Last modified on October 30 2007.