Lancet: Tackling Climate Change Is Good for Health

The health benefits of strategies for tackling climate change were described as "a convenient truth" at the launch of groundbreaking research published by the Lancet yesterday.

The series of six papers, published two weeks before the crucial climate negotiations in Copenhagen, explore how policies to mitigate against climate change will affect the health and lives of populations around the world.

The research was carried out by an international team, led by Professor Sir Andrew Haines, Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to analyse the effects of policies on food, transport, the built environment, household energy, electricity generation, and greenhouse emissions.

Key findings

• Household energy emissions: In the UK, improvements in household energy efficiency could have net benefits for health, mainly through improved indoor temperature and air quality.  In poor countries, national programmes offering low-emission stove technology for burning local biomass fuels could avert millions of premature deaths, and constitute one of the strongest and most cost-effective climate-health linkages.
• Urban land transport: meeting targest to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions will require more walking and cycling and less motor vehicle use, which will bring substantial health benefits, including from reduced cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes and dementia.
• Low-carbon electricity generation: changing methods of electricity generation to reduce CO2 emissions would reduce particulate air pollution and deaths. The effect would be greatst in India and lowest in the EU.  The cost of these changes woudl be significantly offset by reduced costs of death from pollution, especially in China and India.
• Agriculture and food: livestock farming is responsible for four-fifths of CO2 emissions from agriculture and food production.  A reduction in the consumption of animal source foods could have great benefits for cardiovascular health.

The series has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Royal College of Physicians the Economic and Social Research Council, the Department for Health, National Institute for Health Research, the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences, with support from WHO.

At the launch, Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Health, said: "Health Ministers across the globe must act now to highlight the risk global warming poses to the health of our communities. We need well-designed climate change policies that drive health benefits."

Read online

Read the original papers, available free online from the Lancet here.