WHO calls on mitigating climate crisis for health protection

Geneva, Switzerland | Xinhua | On the occasion of the World Health Day which falls on April 7, the World Health Organization (WHO) called on all governments to take concrete actions to mitigate the climate crisis for the health of our planet and the health of humans.

The theme for this year’s World Health Day was “Our planet, our health.”

The climate crisis is a health crisis, in which air pollution kills seven million people every year and 99 percent of the world’s population breathes unhealthy air, mainly as a result of burning fossil fuels, according to a release from the UN health agency on Thursday.

The warming world is also facilitating the spread of mosquitoes and the diseases they carry, while extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, land degradation and water scarcity are displacing people and damaging their health, warned WHO.

Meanwhile, systems producing highly processed unhealthy foods are driving obesity, increasing cancer and heart diseases, and generating one-third of greenhouse gas emissions.

“This World Health Day, as the world recovers and rebuilds from the (COVID-19) pandemic, we have a choice,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, calling on all countries to stop subsidizing economies and products that destroy health and well-being, pumping carbon into that atmosphere at the same rate, and adopting patterns of consumption which caused diabetes, hypertension, heart diseases and cancer.

In an earlier statement, WHO said the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fault lines of inequity across the world, underlining the urgency for creating sustainable, well-being societies which do not breach ecological limits and which ensure that all people have access to life-saving and life-enhancing tools, systems, policies and environments.

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Xinhua