Interventions that consider climate change, sustainability, and nature should be integral to health system functioning. Placing sustainability at the core of the NHS’s future offers opportunities to deliver better services, support healthier populations, and save costs.
The combined threats of climate change and biodiversity loss are a global public health emergency requiring urgent attention.12 The health impacts of these crises are far reaching, spanning the direct effects of changing weather patterns, such as heat waves causing cardiovascular events or severe dehydration; damage to health infrastructure through extreme weather events; system disruptions to the upstream determinants of health, such as reduced crop viability affecting nutritional status; and the direct health effects of fossil fuel combustion, such as respiratory diseases from air pollution.3 The NHS contributes about 5% of UK fossil fuel emissions and generates substantial waste,4 which feeds into a cycle where he
New report details the threat but stops short of recommending specific actions
Published shortly after the first ever health day at the UN’s annual climate conferences,1 the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) report, Health Effects of Climate Change in the UK ,2 vividly sets out the current and future health threats posed by a changing climate and is essential reading after a year of unprecedented climate records.3
The UKHSA report provides a UK focus on the large and growing global evidence for the health impacts of climate change (as documented annually by the Lancet countdown report4). Over 15 chapters and 721 pages, the report details the evidence that the health consequences of global heating of 4.3°C by 2081-2100 would be broad and devastating in the UK. This high-end 4.3°C scenario would be the result of greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise throughout the 21st century,5 the likelihood of which depends on how quickly all countries take action. However, the authors jus
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First published on Tue 16 Mar 2021 20.05 EDT
The considerable use of personal protective equipment (PPE) in health and social care services in England during the first six months of the pandemic added an additional 1% to the carbon burden, a new analysis suggests.
Between February and August 2020, about 3bn items of PPE were utilised – generating over 106,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, according to research conducted at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. This equates to 591 tons a day, which works out to roughly 27,000 times the average individual’s daily carbon footprint, the authors estimated in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.