Climate change is now the biggest concern facing health ministers in Commonwealth countries, the organisation’s secretary general has warned.
Patricia Scotland said it was a “reality today” rather than a problem of the future, with impacts such as heat stress and increases in insect-borne diseases particularly acute in smaller states.
“If you look at what’s happening in zoonotic diseases, if you look at what’s changing in terms of malaria, lots of dengue fever, chikungunya – all this is climate related,” she said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the climate crisis will cause about 250,000 extra deaths a year between 2030 and 2050 from malaria, malnutrition, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.
Referring to the international target of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels, Lady Scotland said: “If you look at Tuvalu, we said in 2015, that it was ‘1.5 to stay alive’. That wasn’t a slogan, that was a reality [in] Tuvalu.
“We are now at 1.5 [celsius]. So every time the ministers leave Tuvalu, they are never totally confident that when they come back, their island will still be there. That is not the reality of tomorrow – that is their reality today.
“It worries me incredibly that the clock has ticked and ticked and ticked, and it’s running out,” she added.
She has been secretary general of the Commonwealth since 2016, surviving an attempt to remove her by Boris Johnson two years ago and an earlier media storm over a refit of her residence.
Speaking at a meeting of Commonwealth health ministers in Geneva last month, during which the group committed to building climate-resilient health systems in the most vulnerable countries, Scotland listed a series of “shocks” that had put pressure on the 25 small island developing states (SIDS) that make up almost half of the Commonwealth’s membership.
They include the health and economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as debt problems and food insecurity – made worse by the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Those factors made it harder to create the kind of strong, well-staffed health systems that could prove resilient in the face of the climate crisis, Scotland said.