Our kids had little to do wiith climate change, but they will bear the brunt

C

limate change poses a significant and growing threat to public health. However it’s our children who, despite being the least responsible for causing it, unfairly bear the brunt of the impacts.

Foreword by
Professor Fiona Stanley

No Time For Games: Children’s Health and Climate Change collates scientific research on the child health effects of climate change, both in Australia and at a global level.

 

Doctors for the Environment Australia’s timely report demonstrates extreme weather events and increasing temperatures are already causing childhood illness in households throughout Australia.

Furthermore gastro-intestinal diseases, respiratory and heat related illnesses, and the physical and mental health impacts of floods, bushfires and droughts areall expected to rise.

This report makes it clear that Australia must be prepared to adapt our care of children to the threats our young people are experiencing as a result of climate change.

Our already stretched health services must immediately prepare for an inevitable increase in childhood sickness by training GPs and specialists, and educating the wider community, especially parents.

Crucially, federal and state governments must take immediate steps to curtail increasing temperatures by whatever means necessary. This includes contributing robust targets at the UN global climate change negotiations in Paris in 2015 which are aimed at setting strong emissions reduction targets to stall temperature rises.

Failure to act responsibly will have dire consequences for our children’s wellbeing, and the impacts of inadequate action for their children verge on the apocalyptic and are too scary to contemplate.

Conversely choosing now to limit further climate change offers a major opportunity to immediately improve the health of our children via reductions in air pollution and design of low carbon cities.

If we do nothing how will our generation, who had the chance to act but failed to do so, justify our inaction to future generations living on what will become an inhospitable planet?

As a parent, a grandmother and a public health professional with a long career in primary prevention, I strongly urge all Australians to get behind this report’s bold recommendations. Together we can and must help tackle climate change for the sake of our children, while there is still time.