Connecting Climate Change and Health Through Global Summitry

Abstract

The strengthening scientific consensus about the connection between climate change and health is not reflected at the relevant organizations of the United Nations (UN). It has been more adequately addressed by the informal Group of Eight (G8). Relative to the G8 with its comprehensive agenda, intermittent UN summits focused on health, environment, or development have lagged in recognizing and responding to the connection. This poorer UN performance is not caused by changes in the scientific consensus, or by severe climate and health shocks, which should spur both summit systems, particularly the UN, to act. It depends more on the comprehensiveness, flexibility, annual occurrence, and compact like-mindedness of the G8 summits compared to the subject-specific, organizationally constrained, intermittent, internally divergent UN ones. This suggests the UN will struggle to transform the Millennium Development Goals into new post-2015 sustainable development goals and define a post-2015 climate change control regime with a closer climate-health connection, unless the G8 and now Group of 20 summits address the connection in a UNsupportive way.

Regional and global impacts of the 2007 Port-of-Spain Declaration on noncommunicable diseases

“…POSS also had an early, significant influence on the global governance of NCDs, through the 2011 HLM, the 2014 HLM, and the 2015 SDG Summit, although that influence progressively diminished. The 2011 HLM, held only four years after the POSS, was the second-ever United Nations summit devoted to health (9). The POSS pioneers, leaders, and governments provided the essential initial global ambition, vision and strategy, continuous efforts, and expanding array of international allies to produce the global results.…”

“…A majority (56%) of the 2011 HLM commitments had at least one POSS precursor commitment (Table 1). The rest (44%) came from new subjects, such as alcohol use, accountability, and climate change (9).…”

“…This study uses a method developed by the University of Toronto’s Global Governance Program to measure members’ compliance with commitments from a particular summit and how well those commitments matched commitments from a previous summit (5-9).…”

The political process in global health and nutrition governance: the G8's 2010 Muskoka Initiative on Maternal, Child, and Newborn Health

“…The Lancet labeled it “a welcome cornerstone of the summit's work.” At Muskoka, health issues generally received 26% of the words in the concluding communiqués, and MNCH specifically received 18%. Those documents affirmed the principle that health and MNCH were linked to food and nutrition and to climate change, making a climate–health connection that UN summits had largely failed to make . The G8 at Muskoka made 10 commitments on health, heavily focused on the health MDGs.…”

La soberanía de la salud como marco conceptual de la salud indígena: el caso de la medicina Misak

“…El último Informe Mundial sobre la Situación de los Pueblos Indígenas destaca las condiciones desiguales que enfrentan y cómo se afectan su salud y su bienestar al ser vulnerados sus derechos territoriales (1). Las consecuencias de un mundo globalizado han creado una sobrecarga en la dinámica del movimiento de personas, patógenos y plagas; por ello, urgen nuevas ideas e instituciones regulatorias y promotoras de la salud indígena (2). La Organización Panamericana de la Salud (OPS) plantea prácticas para el cumplimiento de los derechos de los pueblos, como el acceso a servicios integrales de salud que sean culturalmente sensibles y que reconozcan la Medicina Indígena (MI) (3).…”