The Lancet Countdown: tracking progress on health and climate change

The Lancet Countdown: tracking progress on health and climate change is an international, multidisciplinary research collaboration between academic institutions and practitioners across the world.

It follows on from the work of the 2015 Lancet Commission, which concluded that the response to climate change could be “the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century”.

The Lancet Countdown aims to track the health impacts of climate hazards; health resilience and adaptation; health co-benefits of climate change mitigation; economics and finance; and political and broader engagement.

Read the report - “The Lancet Countdown: tracking progress on health and climate change.”

Medical staff in dark about policies to mitigate health risks of climate change, study says

Australian health professionals overwhelmingly say they don’t know of any policies that deal with the health implications of climate change, despite the World Health Organisation saying “climate change is the climate change to global health in the 21st century”.

The results come from the first national snapshot of the knowledge and views of doctors, nurses, health academics and other health professionals on the topic of climate and health.

They were collected by the Climate and Health Alliance, as the group prepares to present its national strategy on climate, health and wellbeing discussion paper to politicians in Canberra this month.

Liz Hanna, the president of the Climate and Health Alliance, said the strategy was supported by groups representing most of the health industry and represented the most important move in the climate and health space in Australia to date.

Read The Guardian story - “Medical staff in dark about policies to mitigate health risks of climate change, study says.”

Climate change threatens to undo 50 years of community health

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limate change poses such a threat to public health it risks undoing the gains of the last 50 years, a major study has found.

The Lancet Commission on climate change and health has found the threat continues to be underestimated, but that tackling it could be a huge opportunity to improve global health.

"The effects of climate change are being felt today, and future projections represent an unacceptably high and potentially catastrophic risk to human health," said the report published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet.

Read the ABC story - “Climate change presents 'potentially catastrophic' risks to public health,Lancet Commission study finds”.