Insight

Vanessa Kerry: What are the solutions to tackling climate change and health?

Photo taken from Vanessa Kerry/LinkedIn

May 5, 2024, 10:01

Vanessa Kerry: What are the solutions to tackling climate change and health?

Vanessa Kerry, CEO of Seed Global Health and WHO Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health shared a post on LinkedIn:

“What are the solutions to tackling climate change and health?
Today at Harvard Global Health Institute’s 2024 Global Health Symposium I put forward the necessary steps needed:

1. We must reduce the carbon emissions which are killing us daily – over 5 million people die each year from air pollution alone.
2. Strengthening health systems to build resilience and investing in the health workforce are our best adaptation to climate change.
3. There is a critical lack of data about the impacts. We must support countries to assess their climate and health gaps and vulnerabilities.
4. We should also recognize investing in health systems is a solution that solves multiple challenges, it is our drive towards United Health Care (UHC), our fight against the existing pandemics.

The solutions are simple, but we need to go much faster – mobilizing more financing to fund them is key.

Thank you, Harvard Global Health Institute, for inviting me to speak at this event and getting us talking about action-oriented approaches and to Harvard student Nicolas Dominguez Carrero for a brilliant conversation on the climate and health nexus.

We must be optimistic about the future – the challenge of climate change is huge, but also presents a tremendous opportunity. Each and every one of us has the ability to be an agent of change and help create the future we want to see.

Thank you Ingrid Katz for the action shot from the event.”

Source: Vanessa Kerry/LinkedIn