Fiona Armstrong from Climate and Health Alliance talks about the health risks of climate change

BZE's Vivien Langford speaks with Fiona Armstrong, Convenor of the Climate and Health Alliance.

Fiona discusses the establishment in 2010 of the Climate and Health Alliance, which was formed in response to an increasing concern within the health profession of the lack of awareness around the health risks of climate change.

Fiona Armstrong interview

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Transcript

Vivien: Our first guest is Fiona Armstrong and I’d like to introduce her as someone who has been of great help to our show. She’s been a very good networker and put me onto some excellent contacts for our radio program. So I’d like to thank you, Fiona. Fiona’s claim to fame is that she’s the convenor of an organisation called Climate and Health Alliance. Their members are a very impressive list of people in the health profession, such as the Australian Nursing Federation, the Australian Psychological Society, the Doctors’ Reform Society, and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. There are social workers, the Australian Hospitals and Healthcare Association, and many many more. It’s a great long list of people associated with this Climate and Health Alliance. So, Fiona can you tell us a bit about yourself and how did this Climate and Health Alliance start.

Fiona: Sure, thank you Vivien. Well the Climate and Health Alliance was born out of an idea, a conversation between a few of us at a health congress a few years ago. I was very involved then with a similar alliance that was advocating around health reform. That proved to be a very effective model for advocacy, in terms of bringing a whole bunch of health-care stakeholders together and developing a consensus position. It had quite an impact on national health policy at the time and was very significant in the Rudd Government adopting health reform as a major health policy priority, coming into power in 2007.

So a few of us who were concerned around climate change and environmental health tossed around the idea for a green health alliance to see if there was some interest in that. It was like one of those conversations between very busy people. We all thought it was a good idea and no-one had time to do anything about it. We sort of cogitated on it for a while, I suppose.

I left my job in health policy to go and do a Masters in Politics and Public Policy, looking at climate change. When I finished that I thought I would test the appetite for a climate and health alliance, or a greenhouse alliance as we were calling it then. So we had a meeting in Melbourne in 2010. We had nearly all the major national health-care stakeholders attend that meeting and there was a unanimous decision to establish the Alliance at that meeting. And I think that was reflective of the increasing concern in the health-care sector about the lack of awareness around the health risks of climate change and also a growing sense of responsibility from health professionals to advocate around action on climate change.

Vivien: Well, you’ve mentioned people with busy lives. A lot of doctors that I know seem to have super busy lives and they’re terribly dedicated but, I imagine, bogged down in the here and now, and saving people’s lives. How do you persuade them to take this extra action, like thinking into the future for health policy? Also , which parts of the health profession have been most helpful to you? Which people get it?

Fiona: Well, just like the rest of the community, it is difficult to communicate the health issues around climate change or climate impacts more broadly. Certainly the public health fraternity are very plugged into it. They’re the people who deal with whole population health so they are very aware of the impact on natural environments and health and so on. Also, people who are engaged in health promotion tend to have a fairly deep understanding of the issue that we are dealing with.

It’s certainly the case that health professionals don’t necessarily disregard it because they don’t think it’s important. But it is the case that the health sector is very ‘strapped’ and people, literally, are busy saving lives. I think not all that many have had the opportunity to be fully exposed to the science and to really understand what a threat it is to human health. So one of the things that we hope to do, as well as affecting policy makers and advocating for policy makers to take action, is to better inform the health profession and encourage them, that a core element of their role is to advocate for action on climate change.

Vivien: That’s great because I meet doctors who are quite conservative. They’re interested in their specialty and perhaps they’re not thinking on that big public health level. Actually one of my friends who is not a conservative – she is a doctor though – said to me that the secret that dares not speak its name is that, the more old people who pop off from climate effects, the less money that will have to be spent on them by the Government. Taking that further, thinking maybe behind closed doors in the United Nations and so on, global warming is a low priority because people will be wiped out. Maybe there’s a cynical approach there. Of course no politician will admit this, but, in fact, the homeless, the poor, the people ill-equipped to prepare for the worst of climate change will be lost or sacrificed. Do you think there’s anything behind that?

Fiona: It’s true that one of the issues in health is that, NOT investing in health is one of the ways of saving money, because health care is very expensive. It’s true that people who are elderly and who experience chronic illness are certainly very vulnerable to climate change and are probably the people, who, in Australia, do experience the most severe climate impacts. But certainly the case is that, worldwide, the bulk of climate health impacts are felt by children. In fact, 80% of the health burden from climate change falls on children. I think that that’s not well understood and I don’t think policy makers would be making the decisions that they are making if that was well understood or if children could advocate for themselves.

Certainly one of the problems about this issue is that the people who are going to be most significantly impacted are powerless and without a voice. That does make it all the more urgent that we do advocate on their behalf.

Vivien: Well, at the moment we’re seeing a lot of the East African famine on TV and I think the ABC has been having a campaign for people to give to the United Nations fund on that. But do you think people here should be alerted to the threat to public health here and now? It’s not just in Africa, it’s not just far away where the climate is more significantly impacting on people, like Pacific Islanders, but here and now. Do you think if people saw their own health self-interest they’d take action and perhaps pressure government on this issue?

Fiona: Yes, I think that is true. I think it is the case that, for many people, climate change is distant both in time and place. People think that it’s far off in the future and that the worst impacts are going to be elsewhere. But the reality is that we are already experiencing quite significant climate impacts here in Australia. We saw that in the 2009 heatwave that preceded the Black Saturday bushfires here in Victoria, where we had an extraordinary spike in people seeking help for exacerbations of chronic illness. There was a big leap in demand for ambulances, an eight-fold increase in heat-related presentations to Emergency Departments, and a three-fold increase in cardiac arrests and people dead on arrival.

So these impacts are not far off in the future and nor are they affecting only people in Africa. They are really affecting people here in Australia. Certainly one of the things that we take very seriously, and hope to use to our advantage, is the sense of concern that everybody holds for their own health. In that way, framing climate change as a health issue is a way of making more people pay attention. The communication science around it suggests that, when climate change is framed as a health issue, people are much more likely to perceive it as an individual threat and to see it as having impacts for them.

We know that people do care about their health, even though they don’t necessarily always make very good decisions about their health, but they do care about it. We see that in the polling coming up to every election. Health is always [ranked] one, two or three. So it’s our hope that, by linking climate change and health together – because climate change is generally quite a bit further down, depending on what’s going on at the time – we can drag climate change up the list in terms of making it an issue that people are concerned about and want to see action taken on.

Vivien: Well that’s right, especially if these heat waves are going to become more frequent – they’re not going to be one in 100 years, these severe weather events (not just heat waves). What sort of policies are you hoping to promote? I know your organisation has only been in existence for a year but I would imagine you would be pretty keen on lobbying. What policies would you be lobbying for?

Fiona: Well, one of the things that we are keen to make policy makers aware of is the importance of having integrated policies to address a whole range of things. For that reason we have 13 policy priorities that range from health, to energy, to transport, to built environment, to water, to citizen engagement. I guess the point that we are wanting to make there is that each of those areas has impacts on human health. So, if energy policy has impacts on human health, that makes it health policy.

What we are trying to do is to raise awareness among policy makers, the community and the media about the links between each of those areas. So, for example, we are involved in a campaign to restore adequate environmental flows to the Murray-Darling Basin at the moment. I’ll be in Canberra tomorrow, meeting with Minister Burke to discuss the health impacts of inadequate environmental flows and to highlight the …

Vivien: What are they? Can you tell us?

Fiona: Well, there’s a range of things. Declining water quality and algal blooms, for example, have quite severe health effects and can be quite toxic. There are also issues associated with water impurity, and depression that we’ve seen when we’ve had severe and prolonged drought in rural Australia. The point that we would be making is that the economy is dependent on a healthy ecosystem, not the other way round. The debate around that issue at the moment is putting one against the other.

We are entirely dependent on healthy ecosystems for healthy soil, air and water. It’s not an eitheror situation which is, I think, well understood at a sort of subconscious level, but certainly not explicitly recognised in policy making. In order to get good environmental and public health outcomes we absolutely need to make that connection very apparent and to build it into the policies that we develop.

Vivien: I couldn’t agree more. I can’t wait for the ads, like the anti-smoking ads. I can’t wait for the pro-health ads that will make us see the connection with climate! In that context, you mentioned mental health of farmers in drought. I know in India there have been many suicides. In Australia there are too. Some of the politicians are aware of this and they talk about it.

You’ve said something on your website about framing the message, that we need to tell the climate message as it is. It’s a very tough challenge but the other part of that message is that there is some actions we can take. It’s not rocket science. There are actions we can actually take. Beyond Zero Emissions is very much about that, as you know. We are all into solutions. What would you say when you are talking to leaders, like tomorrow you are going to be talking to politicians? How would you frame the message because lots of our listeners would probably like to know that too?

Fiona: The health frame is a very important one. The other key message that we like to convey – and it’s a very important one in terms of giving people hope, but also allowing people to understand that it is possible to take effective action on climate change, and it’s good for our health – is to talk about the benefits of climate action. It’s certainly the case that there are many benefits that can be brought to public health by strategies to reduce emissions. So, for example, if we move to cleaner power generation we will reduce the pollution that’s created from the mining of fossil fuels. We can really impact on the cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and cancers that are associated with fossil fuel power generation.

The same applies to fossil fuel powered transport. So strategies that would reduce emissions in the transport sector will also bring concurrent health benefits. The reduction in air pollution from vehicle emissions will not only help us to act on climate change but it brings really significant benefits to public health in terms of improving respiratory disease, and reducing asthma and allergies, and so on.

There are other ways that we can improve public health as well, with strategies that both cut emissions and improve health. For example, moving from a dependence on private cars, that we have here in Australia and in much of the developed world, in getting people where possible (and through clever urban planning we can make this possible for many people, getting out of their cars and into using either public or active transport, such as walking and cycling, can allow us to address us some of our most intractable national health burdens, in terms of the lifestyle diseases, like cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes and even depression.

So the good news is that action on climate change doesn’t necessarily need to be only about sacrifice and loss. In fact it can bring about changes to all of those systems that will not only allow us to cut emissions but to improve health, and not only improve health from what it would have been, but improve our current health status.

Vivien: I’m totally behind you and I think that‘s a wonderful picture. We’ll finish there. I had one more question to ask you about the climate health conference in Durban at the end of this year. After that, maybe you can tell us a bit more.

Fiona: I’d love to, Vivien.

Vivien: Thank you very much, Fiona.