Health, Equity and Climate Change

Speaker: Julian Sheather, PhD, Consultant World Health Organization

According to the World Health Organization, climate change is the single biggest threat facing humanity. Tackling the health threats of climate change, including by mitigation and adaptation, will be critical in the coming decades. Climate change gives rise to profound questions of equity or fairness. Those nations who have contributed most to climate change are not the ones most effected by it. Those nations and peoples most effected by it are often those with the fewest resources to tackle it. In addition, climate change has profound implications for younger generations, and for generations as yet unborn. Responding to the health impacts of climate change therefore involves complex questions of global and intergenerational equity and fairness. Climate change also puts centre-stage the dependence of human health on the health of the world's ecosystems. This gives rise to challenging ethical questions about whether duties are owed to non-human parts of the biosphere. This talk explores the range of equity issues that health and climate change give rise to. 

Learning Objectives: After attending this webinar, attendees will be able to:

• Understand in outline the key equity issues and challenges that climate change gives rise to.
• Understand how health and climate change presents challenges to human-centred or anthropocentric concepts of equity and fairness.
• Gain insight into the complexity of practical responses to health and climate change, including questions of identifying responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, deciding what, if any reparative obligations are owed and what kinds of global governance might be required.