WHO call to protect health from climate change

Dear readers,
With less than two weeks away from the climate change negotiations in Paris (COP-21), please take a moment, if you haven’t done so, and sign the WHO Call to Action on health and climate change and encourage your wider networks, friends, colleagues and other organizations to also sign.

Climate change has the potential to do serious harm to the health of individuals around the world. But tackling climate change could substantially reduce the risks while also improving human health by, for example, delivering cleaner air and healthier cities.
That’s why WHO is asking you to support our call to action, with the aim at raising awareness of the health opportunities we can realise by tackling climate change now.

WHO call to action will be presented at the Paris COP and will demand a climate deal that delivers:
• Strong and effective action to limit climate change, and avoid unacceptable risks to global health.
• Scaling up of financing for adaptation to climate change: including public health measures to reduce the risks from extreme weather events, infectious disease, diminishing water supplies, and food insecurity, and
• Actions that both reduce climate change and improve health, including reducing the number of deaths from cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases that are caused by air pollution (currently over 7 million per annum).

You can take action today by:

1. Signing the WHO Call to Action. Click here and sign.
2. Sharing it with your professional networks, friends and family.
3. Learning more about how acting on climate change could improve human health.

Read the WHO statement calling on countries to protect health from climate change.
View the WHO/UNFCCC climate and health country profiles and read the release.
Read the feature story from Bangladesh
Read the WHO commentary Our climate, our health: It’s time for all health professionals to take action

I count on you and encourage you to join forces with us in the journey leading up to COP-21.

Best wishes,
Dr Maria Neira
Director
Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health
World Health Organization