Documents The Lancet Planetary Health 28 results

"In the 1930s, a few people knew that nuclear weapons would be potentially cataclysmic. By the 1960s, there was a well-established anti-nuclear weapon peace movement, but the protestors were treated as fools by the media. By the 1980s, it was becoming clear that nuclear war was mass annihilation and could not be avoided by threats of mutually assured destruction. Disarmament began in earnest.
The climate emergency has a similar trajectory,3 but without that most imminent of threats. People's reaction to both is similar: ignorance, acceptance, revulsion, and rejection, but only generation by generation. People tend to stick with what they believed as teenagers. Today's teenagers know that the climate emergency is real, just as the teenagers who put flowers in the barrels of guns in the 1960s knew what their parents did not. ..."

"Both climate change and COVID-19 are global public health crises threatening lives and livelihoods, increasing poverty, exacerbating inequalities, and damaging economic growth prospects. However, with the pandemic temporarily overshadowing the climate emergency, COVID-19 could have dramatic consequences for the progress on climate change and human health. While the postponed 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) approaches and governments are due to submit enhanced climate commitments, there is an opportunity to address both crises in tandem.1..."

"Climate change arguably represents one of the greatest global health threats of our time. Health professionals can advocate for global efforts to reduce emissions and protect people from climate change; however, evidence of their willingness to do so remains scarce. In this Viewpoint, we report findings from a large, multinational survey of health professionals (n=4654) that examined their views of climate change as a human health issue. Consistent with previous research, participants in this survey largely understood that climate change is happening and is caused by humans, viewed climate change as an important and growing cause of health harm in their country, and felt a responsibility to educate the public and policymakers about the problem. Despite their high levels of commitment to engaging in education and advocacy on the issue, many survey participants indicated that a range of personal, professional, and societal barriers impede them from doing so, with time constraints being the most widely reported barrier. However, participants say various resources—continuing professional education, communication training, patient education materials, policy statements, action alerts, and guidance on how to make health-care workplaces sustainable—can help to address those barriers. We offer recommendations on how to strengthen and support health professional education and advocacy activities to address the human health challenges of climate change."

"COVID-19 is unique in the scope of its effects on morbidity and mortality. However, the factors contributing to its disparate racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic effects are part of an expansive and continuous history of oppressive social policy and marginalising geopolitics. This history is characterised by institutionally generated spatial inequalities forged through processes of residential segregation and neglectful urban planning. In the USA, aspects of COVID-19's manifestation closely mirror elements of the build-up and response to the Flint crisis, Michigan's racially and class-contoured water crisis that began in 2014, and to other prominent environmental injustice cases, such as the 1995 Chicago (IL, USA) heatwave that severely affected the city's south and west sides, predominantly inhabited by Black people. Each case shares common macrosocial and spatial characteristics and is instructive in showing how civic trust suffers in the aftermath of public health disasters, becoming especially degenerative among historically and spatially marginalised populations. Offering a commentary on the sociogeographical dynamics that gave rise to these crises and this institutional distrust, we discuss how COVID-19 has both inherited and augmented patterns of spatial inequality. We conclude by outlining particular steps that can be taken to prevent and reduce spatial inequalities generated by COVID-19, and by discussing the preliminary steps to restore trust between historically disenfranchised communities and the public officials and institutions tasked with responding to COVID-19."

"We applaud Michele J Gelfand and colleagues on their analysis of cultural tightness–looseness in relation to COVID-19.1 Their work provides an informative and, given the reported effect sizes, compelling demonstration that countries with greater cultural tightness have fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths than culturally looser countries do. The authors also propose an interesting corollary to their results, stating that: “The results suggest that tightening social norms might confer an evolutionary advantage in times of collective threat.” and that “Social norm interventions will be critical for helping groups to tighten norms […] to deal with future collective threats.”. These statements raise an intriguing and important possibility. Cultural tightness might offer a compelling explanation for variations in, and be a potential vector for influencing, national action on another collective threat: national climate change mitigation. We tested this possibility..."

"How do societies channel flows of information so that they can be responded to meaningfully, effectively, and wisely? How do societies maintain and transmit values, skills, and insights about the world so that they can be reproduced and built upon from one generation to the next? These are questions that might generally be assembled under the heading of collective intelligence; and while the term collective intelligence has been increasingly appropriated by studies of computing, business, and finance,1 it may be argued that a naturalistic study of collective intelligence—one that examines the ways that structures of collective perception, meaning making, and decision making function, evolve, and are reproduced across time2—is crucial to the field of planetary health, pertaining as it does to the wellbeing of both society and the natural world..."

"Although effects on labour is one of the most tangible and attributable climate impact, our quantification of these effects is insufficient and based on weak methodologies. Partly, this gap is due to the inability to resolve different impact channels, such as changes in time allocation (labour supply) and slowdown of work (labour productivity). Explicitly resolving those in a multi-model inter-comparison framework can help to improve estimates of the effects of climate change on labour effectiveness."

"Record climate extremes are reducing urban liveability, compounding inequality, and threatening infrastructure. Adaptation measures that integrate technological, nature-based, and social solutions can provide multiple co-benefits to address complex socioecological issues in cities while increasing resilience to potential impacts. However, there remain many challenges to developing and implementing integrated solutions. In this Viewpoint, we consider the value of integrating across the three solution sets, the challenges and potential enablers for integrating solution sets, and present examples of challenges and adopted solutions in three cities with different urban contexts and climates (Freiburg, Germany; Durban, South Africa; and Singapore). We conclude with a discussion of research directions and provide a road map to identify the actions that enable successful implementation of integrated climate solutions. We highlight the need for more systematic research that targets enabling environments for integration; achieving integrated solutions in different contexts to avoid maladaptation; simultaneously improving liveability, sustainability, and equality; and replicating via transfer and scale-up of local solutions. Cities in systematically disadvantaged countries (sometimes referred to as the Global South) are central to future urban development and must be prioritised. Helping decision makers and communities understand the potential opportunities associated with integrated solutions for climate change will encourage urgent and deliberate strides towards adapting cities to the dynamic climate reality."

"Despite intensive research activity within the area of climate change, substantial knowledge gaps still remain regarding the potential future impacts of climate change on human health. A key shortcoming in the scientific understanding of these impacts is the lack of studies that are conducted in a coordinated and consistent fashion, producing directly comparable outputs. This Viewpoint discusses and exemplifies a bottom-up initiative generating new research evidence in a more coordinated and consistent way compared with previous efforts. It describes one of the largest model comparisons of projected health impacts due to climate change, so far. Yet, the included studies constitute only a selection of health impacts in a variety of geographical locations, and are therefore not a comprehensive assessment of all possible impact pathways and potential consequences. The new findings of these studies shed light on the complex and multidirectional impacts of climate change on health, where impacts can be both adverse or beneficial. However, the adverse impacts dominate overall, especially in the scenarios with more greenhouse gas forcing. Overall, the future population at risk of disease and incidence rates are predicted to increase substantially, but in a highly location-specific and disease-specific fashion. Greenhouse gas emission mitigation can substantially reduce risk and resultant morbidity and mortality. The potential positive impact of adaptation has not been included in the models applied, and thus remains a major source of uncertainty. This bottom-up initiative lays out a research strategy that brings more meaningful research outputs and calls for greater coordination of research initiatives across the health community."

"Almost four decades of climate science have not yet led to transformative policy change at the pace and scale required to confront the climate crisis. Colleagues in the planetary health community attribute much potential to framing climate change as human health issue in order to create greater impact on policy makers. In this Personal View, we discuss the promise and limitations of this approach by drawing on insights from political science and public policy with regards to the complexity of these contentious policy issues. We argue that we, as academics, have a moral obligation to embrace an active role in the knowledge-to-action (KTA) sphere and that we would be well advised to expand our KTA approach to include evidence-based strategies, such as lobbying or civil resistance. As scientists, we can no longer wait to embrace the realpolitik insights of political science to move our evidence into policy action."