Why we need to talk about climate and health: An essay collection

Click here to read an X/Twitter thread about this essay collection. 

Foreword by Helena Bennett and Sophie O’Connell (Green Alliance). 

We are pleased to present this essay collection, with contributions from experts in healthcare and health policy from the UK and farther afield. It explores aspects of the climate change and public health intersection. We hear both from those at the frontline of the profession and of climate change’s impacts on health, and about the health sector’s not inconsiderable contribution to climate change. What these essays together make very clear is that these two agendas can no longer be separated. This goes right to the heart of major public debates around our future healthcare system, societal wellbeing and equity, as well as the UK’s responsibility to nations suffering serious costs to health when they did not contribute to the problem causing them. We hope this will kickstart new dialogue and debate around the need to recognise the inextricable relationship between climate and health in public policy.

Essays 

• Supporting community care for patients and planet (Dr Tamsin Ellis, GP and director of Greener Practice) 
   
• Addressing racism in climate change and health (Sonora English, research assistant, climate and health justice research and engagement at UCL) 
   
• The Carribbean: a view from the frontline (Dr Caroline Allen, board member of EarthMedic and co-author of the Lancet Countdown Report, Climate change and health in small island developing states) 
   
• Health professionals should take the lead on the link between diet and climate (Dr Shireen Kassam, MB BS, FRCPath, PhD, DipIBLM Consultant haematologist and honorary senior lecturer at King’s College Hospital, London)
   
• Greener patient care is within our gift (Clare Nash, RN, MSc Member of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change)
   
• Climate and health experts need to put their heads together (Alice Bell, Head of policy, climate and health at Wellcome) 
   
• We can't ignore the linking factor between planetary and human health (Libby Peake, Head of resource policy, Green Alliance)