Global Climate and Health Summit at COP25

At UN Climate Conference COP25, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA) will convene a one-day summit on climate and health. This will be the latest in the series of summits for health civil society that have been held since COP 17 in Durban.

The coming months are critical in our collective global response to climate change, and the implications for human health are immense. The Paris agreement enshrined the “right to health” as a core principle guiding action on climate change, for the first time formalizing health as a focus in the UNFCCC processes. The World Health Organization has made the “health impacts of climate and environmental change” one of its top priorities.

Though the challenge is great, policy responses to climate change present an unprecedented opportunity for public health, such as by reducing air pollution which is responsible for 7 million premature deaths annually. As impacts of climate change are increasingly felt, the movement of health professionals and health organizations addressing climate change around the world is growing.

The 2019 Global Climate and Health Summit alongside COP25 in Madrid will serve as a central moment for health civil society and other stakeholders to help drive global action to protect health from a changing climate.

The Summit will take place at the Complutense University in Madrid, and will be co-hosted by the Global Climate and Health Alliance in collaboration with the World Health Organization Regional Office for the Americas of the World Health Organization / Pan American Health Organization, the University of California-San Francisco, and the Harvard Global Health Institute.

VENUE:

Madrid, Spain
7 December 2019

Original source: WHO
Published on 21 November 2019