Commonwealth health ministries under pressure amid rise in climate-related illnesses
Climate change is now the biggest concern facing health ministers in Commonwealth countries, the organisation’s secretary general has warned.
Patricia Scotland said it was a “reality today” rather than a problem of the future, with impacts such as heat stress and increases in insect-borne diseases particularly acute in smaller states.
“If you look at what’s happening in zoonotic diseases, if you look at what’s changing in terms of malaria, lots of dengue fever, chikungunya – all this is climate related,” she said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the climate crisis will cause about 250,000 extra deaths a year between 2030 and 2050 from malaria, malnutrition, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.
Referring to the international target of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels, Lady Scotland said: “If you look at Tuvalu, we said in 2015, that it was ‘1.5 to stay alive’. That wasn’t a slogan, that was a reality [in] Tuvalu.
“We are now at 1.5 [celsius]. So every time the ministers leave Tuvalu, they are never totally confident that when they come back, their island will still be there. That is not the reality of tomorrow – that is their reality today.
