Climate Solutions Double as Health Interventions

Abstract

The climate crisis threatens to exacerbate numerous climate-sensitive health risks, including heatwave mortality, malnutrition from reduced crop yields, water- and vector-borne infectious diseases, and respiratory illness from smog, ozone, allergenic pollen, and wildfires. Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stress the urgent need for action to mitigate climate change, underscoring the need for more scientific assessment of the benefits of climate action for health and wellbeing. Project Drawdown has analyzed more than 80 solutions to address climate change, building on existing technologies and practices, that could be scaled to collectively limit warming to between 1.5° and 2 °C above preindustrial levels. The solutions span nine major sectors and are aggregated into three groups: reducing the sources of emissions, maintaining and enhancing carbon sinks, and addressing social inequities. Here we present an overview of how climate solutions in these three areas can benefit human health through improved air quality, increased physical activity, healthier diets, reduced risk of infectious disease, and improved sexual and reproductive health, and universal education. We find that the health benefits of a low-carbon society are more substantial and more numerous than previously realized and should be central to policies addressing climate change. Much of the existing literature focuses on health effects in high-income countries, however, and more research is needed on health and equity implications of climate solutions, especially in the Global South. We conclude that adding the myriad health benefits across multiple climate change solutions can likely add impetus to move climate policies faster and further.

Keywords: air quality; climate change; climate mitigation; diet and nutrition; energy; health benefits; infectious disease; physical activity; universal education; voluntary family planning.

Figure 1

Emissions of greenhouse gases by sector and area of human activity. Emissions are weighted by their global warming potential over a 100-year period. Data are from the Working Group III Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC [21].

Figure 2

Climate solution thematic areas. Climate solutions are divided into three major categories: those that reduce sources of pollution, those that enhance sinks of carbon removal, and those that address inequities in society with cascading benefits for climate. Minimum and maximum values represent the potential emissions reduction or sequestration of each sector from 2020 to 2050 under two different implementation scenarios, which roughly align with goals of limiting global temperature rise to 2° and 1.5 °C, respectively. For more details about the underlying methodology, see The Drawdown Review [5]. Reproduced with permission from Project Drawdown.