Climate change isn't just about the environment - it's a health problem
LONDON. April 24. KAZINFORM If there's something that the British like to talk about almost as much as the weather, it's our health. When the two combine, they are guaranteed to create headlines. Both extreme heat and extreme cold have a predictable (if preventable) impact on health and mortality.
But although campaigners have struggled for years to fire the public imagination about climate change as an environmental problem, climate change is equally a serious public health issue. And, increasingly, there is evidence that framing climate change as a public health risk might be a better way of reaching beyond the green crowd and into the mainstream.
Could one reason for continuing public ambivalence about climate change be that it has lodged itself in the public consciousness as an environmental, rather than a health concern? A new paper published this month by Canadian researchers Francesca Cardwell and Susan Elliot is only the latest in a string of recent publications that have made exactly this point, arguing that unless more explicit links are made between health risks and climate change, public engagement will remain an uphill struggle, Kazinform has learnt from theguardian.co.uk
Cardwell and Elliot found that few participants made an unprompted link between climate change and health. In another recent research study focusing on members of the American public, framing climate change as a public health issue elicited more positive engagement - emotions such as hope, for example - than framing it as an environmental or national security risk, even among individuals who were typically dismissive of climate change.
Studies like this suggest that when communicators explicitly make the links between climate change and health, the public is likely to listen. Put simply, health is one obvious way in which the abstract concept of climate change becomes real for people - one way in which climate change is manifested in our daily lives. So why isn't the connection being made more frequently?
Some organisations are beginning to join the dots. The Health Protection Agency published a gargantuan report last year, describing in detail the health impacts of climate change in the UK. And at a recent event at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health , I took part in a workshop asking how the health impacts of climate change could be better communicated. It was clear that while there was huge potential for using the health impacts of climate change as a means of engaging the public, there was also a great deal that is not yet well understood.
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