Working Together Saving Tomorrow Today - COP17 Slogan
The 17th Conference of the Parties (or COP17) is now well under way (despite a relatively slow start) in Durban, South Africa. Since the UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) coming into play in 1995, the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC have been meeting annually to assess progress in dealing with climate change.
One of the major arguments to come out of the last 36 hours has been put forward by Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, addressing the first Global and Health climate summit (taking place alongside the main COP 17). He has stated that climate change will hurt governments’ "ability to maintain basic health".
The World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts that "changing climate conditions will lead to increases in malaria, cholera and dengue fever, as well as losses of life due to extreme weather events". The message is that health could be one of the first major casualties of climate change. As a result, The summit’s declaration calls on negotiating governments to deliver a binding agreement by 2014 which "places the protection of human health as a primary objective of any agreement". It also calls for a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions to "avoid a global public health disaster".
However, it is argued that in the long term, the greatest health impacts may not be from acute shocks such as natural disasters, but from gradual build-up of pressure on the natural resources and social system that sustain health, which are already under stress in many parts of the world. It is widely accepted that African countries will be most widely affected by climate change, and therefore high up on the South African health ministers agenda.
You can keep up to date with all the latest information out of Durban here. The conference ends on the 9th December.
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