Page 905 - Week 03 - Thursday, 7 April 2022
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According to the WHO, environmental factors are responsible for almost a quarter of the global burden of disease. The WHO, for World Health Day this year, has posed a number of questions. They are really quite hopeful questions. They want us to re-imagine a world where clean air, water and food are available to everyone. They want us to imagine a world where economies are focused on health and wellbeing, not just GDP. And they want us to imagine a world where cities are liveable and people have control over their health and the health of their planet. It is a really, really hopeful vision and I hope I will one day live to see it.
We have direct experience of what this means here in Canberra. We are in a lucky position here. We are luckier than many others around the world. But we have experienced a lot of the direct impacts of environmental degradation and what that means for our health. In the Black Summer we became intimately aware of what climate change was doing. We all rushed out to buy masks and air purifiers. We lived for weeks in blankets of smoke. We lived in our leaky houses and apartments—those of us who are lucky to have a home. Thirty-one people in Canberra died, directly as a result of the fires. That is a direct correlation between climate change and health.
I have spoken to a lot of doctors about this issue. There has been a strange thing happening in the climate movement over the last few years. Doctors used to be very hesitant to come out and talk about advocacy. They did not really want to conflate public advocacy with their role of being a GP and of providing direct medical advice. But I am finding that more and more GPs are stepping up to speak about what happened that summer and what climate change means. We have got a lot of quite passionate advocacy groups, like Doctors for the Environment, who are also stepping up. I also know that a lot of doctors are worried about not only those 31 people who died but what the long-term impacts are of that summer of smoke. We just do not know.
The ACT Greens went to the election later that year with a promise to work at the intersection of climate change and health. We know that the health of our planet and the health of our people are inherently linked. We cannot pull those apart. According to the Medical Journal of Australia 2019 update on health and climate change, which was published just weeks before this crisis, the warming climate already posed a substantial and mounting threat to public health in Australia.
Climate change impacts our health in a lot of ways. It exposes us to increased temperatures and heatwaves, and more people die from those heatwaves at the moment than from most other natural disasters. It exposes us to smoke from bushfires. It increases the spread of disease—and we are seeing that with Japanese encephalitis at the moment. It exposes us to so many extremes—to the floods and to so many things that are impacting our health now, unfortunately, on a daily basis around Australia.
The ACT needs a strategic, health-based response to climate change and a plan for the health sector to reduce its own contribution to climate change and reach zero emissions. If we want to continue to our shared vision of being the healthiest place in the world to live and of being a city of high wellbeing for everyone, we have to keep
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