What the health was (and still is) an eye-open documentary about the health impact of consuming meat, fish, eggs and dairy products. Consequently, it also shows the health benefits of switching into a plant-based diet. If you also want to know the environmental benefits of plant-based diets, read them here.
There is a quote which I particularly like that summarizes the above pretty well:
Food is about health-care, medicine is about sick-care
Today, in the middle of a global pandemic, the health effects of climate change couldn’t be more clear and notorious. Thus, inspired by this piece-of-art documentary, I felt empowered to “remaster” it into its climate change version — bear with me.
The COVID-19 pandemic has already taken the live of more than 2.5 million (m) people worldwide (March 2021) and has affected the health of 100m more who have contracted the virus. Despite these large figures, they are just a drop in the ocean (e.g. 5% of all yearly deaths). Don’t get me wrong, a single death from COVID is already one too many, so my intention with this article is not to undermine COVID-19 but to raise the awareness from others causes of human death and to show how fighting climate change can directly and indirectly reduce them.
For context, every year the world loses 54m of its citizens (2017) — the equivalent to the population of large European countries such as Spain (47m), Italy (60m) or France (65m). Of these, 18m citizens die from cardiovascular diseases, 10m from neoplasms (cancers) and another 6m from respiratory diseases. Thus, just these 3 account for 34m deaths every year (63% of the total) — more than all citizens in Australia and New Zealand together (30m).
We don’t have a cure for most of the diseases above but we know what are their causes — and climate change could exacerbate some of them.
Even global pandemics such as COVID-19 are believed to be caused by the loss of nature — which is a direct cause of climate change. According to the United Nations Public Health and Climate Change director, 70% of the latest epidemiological outbreaks started with deforestation in the first place. Similarly, air pollution — which again is a direct cause of climate change — is believed to be directly and indirectly related to respiratory diseases and lung cancers.
I’m not an expert in the health impacts of climate change, so I won’t extend further. However, I invite you to reflect on how good could we do if we invest the same efforts and resources to fighting climate change than the ones we devoted to fighting COVID-19.
More concretely, there are 3 main things each country has to work on to fight climate change:
- Mitigation: reducing emissions — this is what everyone has in mind, but it is as important as the two below
- Adaptation: preparing our societies, economies and physical assets for the adverse effects of climate change
- Climate financing: allocating the monetary resources at a global scale to tackle the causes of climate change in its roots (e.g. global investments to reverse the slow renewables deployment and the increased nature loss in developing countries)
COVID-19 might not have taught us how to mitigate emissions, at least not enough: in 2020 global greenhouse gas emissions went down by just 7%, with countries like China — the largest global polluter — increasing its emissions against 2019.
However, it has shown us that:
- Adaptation: we were not prepared (enough) for a global pandemic and we are not prepared neither for the adverse effects of climate change (namely climate disasters)
- Climate financing: the monetary resources we are currently investing — say, in nature loss prevention — are minuscule to those required and those invested in “protecting” our economies from COVID-19 effects. As soon as possible, we need to invest way more resources globally to tackle the causes of climate change in its roots (e.g. loss of nature)
Finally, COVID-19 has also brought some optimism in the fight against climate change. It has shown us the capacity from all countries to act quick, collaboratively and at the scale necessary to fight a global threat such as COVID-19. It is time now to see the elephant in the room… or more precisely, the one waiting next for the ring.
In short, the health impact of climate change is already notorious and it won’t do nothing but to worsen. It is now the time to realize the importance of climate change and to invest the resources needed to i) mitigate its causes and ii) adapt for its foreseeable consequences.
