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WHAT IF WE TREATED CLIMATE CHANGE LIKE A DISEASE? ANDREA DURBACH Andrea Durbach is Emeritus Professor and was Director of the Australian Human Rights Centre (now Institute) at UNSW’s Faculty of Law and Justice from 2004-2017.
SOFIA GRUSKIN Professor Sofia Gruskin directs the University of Southern California’s Institute on Inequalities in Global Health.
In November 2019, Ronda Clarke from the Aboriginal Health Council of Western Australia gave evidence1 before a state government inquiry into the impacts of climate change on health. In her closing statement, she posed the question: “[I]f we were to call climate change a disease, would more people take notice?” A month later, a virus that would result in the deaths of nearly 5 million people was identified in Wuhan, China. The global response by many governments and public health organisations to COVID-19 was urgent and expansive. Almost overnight, national resources were channelled into scientific research to treat and prevent the virus, and to support stringent public health measures deemed necessary to contain it. The world clearly demonstrated its capacity to mobilise and act in the face of an unprecedented public health crisis. Although largely unprepared for the pandemic, the global effort to curbs its reach and minimise its harm was marked by speed, scale and collaboration. Within months of the detection of the virus, vaccines had been developed and trialled; modelling predicted the spread of the disease and the consequent impact on health systems; and restrictions on movement, albeit with devastating and long-term economic and social impacts, proved effective in controlling virus transmission. Yet these vital interventions have been starkly at odds with the drawn-out, often myopic and increasingly negligent global response to an equally persistent but significantly more harmful public health crisis: climate change.
HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDER | VOLUME 30: ISSUE 2 – DECEMBER 2021
The disease analogy seems apt. The risks to health from the climate crisis are well established. In a special report 2 recently released in the lead up to COP26, the World Health Organization declared that climate change “is the single biggest health threat facing humanity”. For decades, climate changes have been disrupting our weather patterns, contaminating our oceans and waterways, rupturing and destroying our fragile ecosystems, poisoning the air we breathe, the water we drink, and undermining our access to food. The disintegration of the earth’s natural defence system – the loss of sea ice, forests, wetlands and biodiversity – greatly increases the prospects for pathogens to spread and pandemics to thrive. And yet our failure to universally mitigate the effects of climate change threatens to undermine the last two years of extraordinary progress and scientific advancement in global health. The symptoms of climate change – extreme temperatures, floods, heatwaves, droughts, fires – are manifestly clear, as are the treatments. What will it take to shake the world from tardiness, indifference and denial in the face of this threat in the same way that countries mobilised in record time to tackle a global pandemic? As the Australian government dithered3 about whether to adopt a modest but critical emissions reduction target, international and Australian experts and advocates participated in an online conference4 on health and human rights concerns exposed by the climate crisis. At the core of the conference mission, is a recognition of the link
