December 2007 Newsletter

Dear readers, welcome to the December 2007 edition of the EPHA Newsletter. We warmly thank you for having accompanied us along 2007 and wish you happiness and a prosperous New Year.

Fifteen days of sometimes emotional and dramatic negotiations at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change ended on 15 December 2007 with the adoption of the Bali Roadmap. This is expected to launch negotiations on a crucial international climate change regime to ensure that the new deal can enter into force by 2013, following the expiry of the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol.

187 countries agreed on a clear agenda for the key issues to be negotiated up to 2009, including actions for adapting to the negative consequences of climate change, ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ways to deploy climate-friendly technologies and financing both adaptation and mitigation measures. Next year’s UN climate change conference will be held in Poznan, Poland.

For more than twenty years there has been an international debate surrounding climate change. Up to now this has been very much an environmental debate with issues such as carbon emissions trading, carbon capture, and the role of clean technology all surrounding the central debate over the extent to which human activity can alter the Global climate. The debate has received the highest political level attention, but it still had an environmental character. This year, however, there has been a growing realisation that not only could a changing climate have impacts beyond the environmental sphere, but that such impacts are already being felt by millions of people across the world.

Fires, droughts, storms and floods have all taken their toll across the globe this year. Indeed at one point more than 100 million people across Africa saw their lands and homes submerged by flood waters. To add to this outbreaks of infectious diseases not previously common to certain areas have occurred, such as the Chikungunya outbreak in Italy.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change completed its fourth assessment report. It concluded that climate change at a global, regional and local level was indeed happening, that global temperatures had risen by around .07 °C, and that this was due to past emissions. What they also included in their report was the scale of the health impacts a changing climate would cause around the globe. The IPCC scientists highlighted how those who that have contributed the least to climate change will be the ones suffering its effects first and hardest with their health or even their lives. A consensus has also emerged that to prevent catastrophic impacts that would lead to billions of deaths future warming must be limited to less than 2°C increase above pre-industrial levels – giving us only a further 1.2°C margin.

Therefore, the stakes were high for negotiators at the Bali meeting. The challenge is how we ensure the most vulnerable are protected from a changing climate and how all can access the fruits of development, including better health, whilst preventing the emissions that cause climate change.

Read all the online articles of our newsletter for December 2007.

EPHA members can find the following new information in the Members Only section:
 Using structural funds for health gain, December 2007
 The impact of structural funds on regional healthcare
 Report on the Mental Health Economics European Network II (MHEEN II)
 Report of World COPD Day

Please note that if an EPHA member would like to feature news about their activities in the EPHA Newsletter, the deadline to submit a new item is Friday 25 January 2008. The staff member responsible for the newsletter is Daniela Negri.