This year during the first-ever virtual Skoll World Forum, Health Care Without Harm organized a session to explore the relationship between the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis. We had planned a session at the Forum in Oxford on the linkages between the climate crisis and health more broadly, but we decided it was essential to link the discussion to the pandemic, which has uncontrollably raged across the Earth for the last four months.
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During our session, Dr. Mandeep Dhaliwal, head of HIV, Health, and Development for UNDP raised the connection that 75 percent of all the novel viruses in the world transfer from animals into people (e.g. SARS, Ebola, MERS, corona virus). This is related to deforestation and the closer interaction between people and wild animals. As we continue to burn and cut down forests, we drive animals from their habitats and bring them closer to human populations. Deforestation, a major driver of the climate crisis, is also a contributor to the spread of novel diseases like corona virus.
We also discussed the negative synergies between air pollution impacts and susceptibility to COVID-19. Dr. Arvind Kumar from the Lung Care Foundation in Delhi described how air pollution (much of it from fossil fuel combustion) ravage the lungs of residents in Delhi, where just breathing was equivalent to smoking at least six cigarette a day. He made the case that the weakening of people’s lungs from air pollution added to their likelihood of suffering severe symptoms when exposed to coronavirus.
A week after the Forum, Harvard School of Public Health corroborated Dr. Kumar’s findings by publishing an analysis that found that in the U.S., people living in badly polluted communities had a 15 percent increase of mortality compared to people living in places with cleaner air. So fossil fuel combustion, the major driver of air pollution and the climate crisis, making it one of the leading killers on the planet, is also a major factor in whether people die from COVID-related respiratory symptoms.
Research across the U.S. also found that the virus is not the great equalizer that people have claimed. In Chicago, while 29 percent of the population is black, 70 percent of the COVID-related mortality have been black people. Similar findings are showing up in communities around the United States. Just as the climate crisis is a force multiplier for all the social, economic, and racial inequities in America, the coronavirus also accentuates the poor health and economic conditions of people of color and their increased vulnerability compared to whites. In Global South countries without basic healthcare and strong safety nets, the pandemic will inevitably kill more poor people living on the edge, those who survive from day-to-day without clean water, safe housing, and enough food to feed their families.
In times of community trauma, we need the health sector to treat the sick and wounded, to anchor the community response, and in extreme weather events, to be the last building standing. During this pandemic, we have heard incredible stories about the dedication and sacrifice of healthcare workers who have dived into the maelstrom to support the sick, even as they have often lacked the basic safety equipment that any soldier needs to enter battle.
The COVID crisis has also demonstrated the critical importance of community health workers. These unsung heroes can relieve clinicians of some of the caregiving tasks and build a broader safety net for those people stuck in their homes with disabilities, mental health issues, or other vulnerabilities. Organizations like Partners in Health and Last Mile Health have advocated for years that community health workers should be paid a living wage and be considered an essential part of the global health workforce. The COVID crisis is showing us that this strategy needs to be baked into global health development funds going forward as core to health system strengthening investments.
The pandemic has generated a great deal of confusion and conflicting public health messaging, with various politicians using the crisis for self aggrandizement and as justification to shut down democratic norms and assume authoritarian control. This political manipulation has also characterized more than 20 years of the climate debate, where the fossil fuel industry funded research and a public relations campaigns to sow doubt about global warming and undermine the role of science in political discourse and decision making (see Participant’s Merchants of Doubt film).
Both crises are raising the profile of health professionals as truth tellers and trusted sources of information, especially in countries where scientific misinformation can be weaponized for narrow political gain. Once we are past the immediate COVID epidemic and turn our attention to the escalating climate crisis, we need to build an army of health professionals that can be messengers on the links between climate and health and become advocates in the larger climate and global survival movement. This will be an essential strategy to countervail the money and messaging of the fossil fuel industry.
We are bearing witness to the end of the period of capitalism where it has been acceptable to poison the Earth and all her species as the cost of doing business. That much is clear. We have tolerated an economic model where the health of people and planet are outside the parameters of GDP, where human life and wellbeing are expendable. The worldview that allowed this institutional violence is in its death throes, but those who subscribe to it are willing to sacrifice all of us in its wake.
A new dream of the Earth is emerging, one where health and equity are key components of a new world economic order, where the purpose of the economy is to feed people, house people, take care of people and heal our communities and the planet, where we no longer subsidize companies that destroy our health, trash the planet, and poison our democracies.
As David Nabbaro, Former UN Special Envoy on the Sustainable Development Goals on Climate and Health, said as we closed out our session at the Skoll Forum, health is an apex goal for our civilization in the 21st century, because if we work together toward the broadest definition of health, we will meet all the sustainable development goals.
The power of the Skoll community is in its broad healing mission, where in every corner of the world change makers design responsive health systems, knit together sustainable farming systems and renewable energy grids, educate and empower girls, hold companies accountable, defend democracy, and support small businesses that serve people’s basic human needs.
Our collective strength was evident as the Skoll Forum expanded its reach and democratized participation this year. “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way,” wrote the novelist Arundati Roy. “On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”. We could also hear her breathing through the 13,000 people who attended the virtual Skoll World Forum from across the globe this year.
Read more about how the Skoll Foundation is responding to COVID-19.
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“File:Old Growth Forest is Gone – panoramio.jpg” by Dennis Cambly is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
