As an advisor to the National Society of Professional Engineers, you have been a
ID: 1712867 • Letter: A
Question
As an advisor to the National Society of Professional Engineers, you have been appointed to a task force with other scholars, scientists, and researchers to evaluate the decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement, and make recommendations about a future course of action that the United States should take regarding these ethical questions. 1. 2. 3. 4. What kind of policy should the government adopt to reduce harmful carbon emissions that contribute to climate change? What kinds of steps can it take to encourage an environmental policy that promotes sustainability? What can it do to ensure public health and safety in terms of impact of climate change on the country's most vulnerable populations? What overall approach do you think best fulfills our duty to future generations to leave a planet for them that is both habitable and just?Explanation / Answer
1)
In order to effectively address global warming, we must significantly reduce the amount of heat-trapping emissions we are putting into the atmosphere.
The good news is that we have the technology and practical solutions at hand to accomplish it.
As individuals, we can help by taking action to reduce our personal carbon emissions. But to fully address the threat of global warming, we must demand action from our elected leaders to support and implement a comprehensive set of climate solutions:
A PRICE ON CARBON
While 10 U.S. states and a growing number of countries are pricing carbon through cap-and-trade systems, Congress is unlikely at this time to enact this approach nationally. Another way to price carbon is a carbon tax. As part of a broader fiscal package, a carbon tax could be designed to be revenue-neutral, for instance by offsetting reductions in payroll or other taxes. Economically, it makes sense to lower taxes on productive activities, such as employment and investment, and offset those reductions by taxing harmful activities such as pollution. From a climate perspective, a relatively modest carbon price escalating over time could provide the market signal needed to promote the development and deployment of clean energy technologies and achieve long-term emission reductions. Such an approach would afford businesses the flexibility to decide how to reduce emissions most cost-effectively, and could be designed to safeguard both energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries and low-income families.
CURBING EMISSIONS FROM MEDIUM- AND HEAVY-DUTY VEHICLES
New standards supported by the auto industry will nearly double the fuel economy of new cars and light trucks by 2025, while lowering their carbon emissions by 40 percent. These measures by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Transportation (DOT) represent the largest federal step ever aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The agencies also recently enacted new standards for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles through model year 2018. The next step is to adopt tighter standards through 2025 for the medium- and heavy-duty fleet, which accounts for 6 percent of total annual U.S. GHG emissions. New standards could improve the fuel economy of these vehicles by an additional 15 percent, reducing annual emissions by 50 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent in 2035.
REDUCING CARBON DIOXIDE FROM POWER PLANTS
The greatest potential for emission reduction is in the power sector, which accounts for roughly a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Legislative options include carbon pricing or a clean energy standard, a market-based approach requiring increased use of low-carbon energy sources. Alternatively, EPA can regulate power plant emissions under the Clean Air Act. A new standard proposed by EPA in early 2012 would limit emissions from new power plants to those generated by a state-of the-art natural gas-fired plant, effectively barring new coal-fired plants without carbon capture-and-storage technology. After finalizing this rule, the next step required under the Clean Air Act is to set standards for existing power plants. In fashioning the standards, EPA can allow states the flexibility to use a range of implementation measures, including market-based approaches such as tradable credits. This would provide utilities greater regulatory certainty as they weigh large investment decisions on upgrading or retiring older plants, and give them flexibility to reduce emissions as cost-effectively as possible.
STRENGTHENING CLIMATE RESILIENCE
The federal government can take steps to improve its own climate resilience and to help states, businesses and communities prepare for more extreme weather and other climate impacts. Federal agencies can provide more technical assistance to state and local officials on the front lines. For instance, a comprehensive climate information service similar to the National Weather Service could help states and localities factor long-range forecasts into their adaptation and disaster response strategies. Congress also can protect federal assets and promote resilience more broadly by ensuring that climate risks are better factored into federal investments. For instance, it can further reform the national flood insurance program to limit taxpayer exposure by better reflecting increased flooding risk, and can require that new or rebuilt infrastructure receiving federal support be constructed to be more climate-resilient.
TAX CREDITS FOR CLEAN ENERGY
Tax policy also has played a vital role in advancing low-carbon technology. For instance, the wind production tax credit has helped to significantly expand U.S. wind energy (35 percent of all new generating capacity in the last five years) and position U.S. manufacturers for the growing global market. Continuing the tax credit will help ensure a diversity of options for clean, affordable and reliable electricity. An appropriate timeline for phasing out the incentive can be established by reviewing the full range of U.S. energy subsidies and setting clear criteria for ending those no longer needed.
Another technology that can benefit from tax incentives is carbon capture and storage. Using CO2 captured from power plants and industrial facilities for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) – injecting CO2 into declining oil fields to increase their output – has the potential to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions while increasing domestic oil production. Expanding an existing tax credit for the use of captured CO2 in EOR, as recommended by our National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative, has the potential both to store as much as 4 billion tons of CO2 and to produce an additional 9 billion barrels of domestic oil over 40 years. Over time, the proposed incentive would generate net federal revenue through oil royalties and tax payments, and would enable future emission reductions by improving the economic viability of carbon capture and storage technologies.
REDUCING SHORT-LIVED CLIMATE FORCERS
While CO2 reductions are critical to long-term efforts to address climate change, curbing greenhouse gases with shorter lifetimes will do more to limit warming and related impacts in the near term. Administrative actions can be taken under existing authorities to reduce emissions of these short-lived climate forcers. "Green completion" rules issued in 2012 will indirectly reduce methane emissions at new natural gas production facilities. Better understanding and more accurate measurement of the emissions from natural gas production and use could potentially identify additional cost-effective emission reduction opportunities along the natural gas value chain. Extending pollution control standards for large landfills to an additional 540 smaller sites could reduce methane emissions by 13 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent annually. Encouraging or requiring the retrofitting of heavy-duty diesel engines with advanced particle controls would significantly reduce emissions of black carbon. Retrofitting half the U.S. heavy-duty fleet could cut emissions by as much as 120 million tons of CO2-equivalent over the next 20 years. HFCs, chemical coolants introduced as substitutes for ozone-depleting compounds, are an increasingly significant contributor to climate change. More climate-friendly alternatives now available would allow the phase-out of HFC-134a in auto air conditioning, by far the largest source of HFC emissions.
IMPROVING ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Increasing the energy efficiency of household appliances, industrial equipment and buildings would reduce fuel consumption and, in turn, greenhouse gas emissions. New efficiency standards for appliances and equipment that the Department of Energy can adopt under its existing authority would avoid an estimated 200 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2035, equivalent to the annual emissions of 49 coal-fired power plants. Annual electricity savings from a range of residential, commercial, industrial and lighting products would equal about 306 terawatt-hours, or 7 percent of projected electricity consumption in 2035. Products and equipment with the greatest energy-saving potential include residential electric water heaters, incandescent lamps, walk-in coolers and freezers, television set-top boxes, electric motors, and computers and monitors.
RD&D FOR LOW-CARBON TECHNOLOGIES
Government support for basic and applied research has long played an important role in advancing energy technologies key to America's economic success. For instance, federally-supported research and development led to the technological breakthroughs enabling the current boom in natural gas production. Particularly at a time when plentiful natural gas may discourage investment in other low-emitting technologies, continued support is needed for RD&D in areas such as wind, solar, nuclear, carbon capture and storage, advanced vehicles and fuels (including low-carbon aviation fuels), and energy storage, and for programs at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to move innovative technologies into the marketplace.
HELPING MAKE THE GRID SMARTER
The federal government can play an important role in facilitating a "smarter" electrical grid to better integrate clean energy generation. For example, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can continue to implement new policies improving the economic viability of renewable power generation and transmission. The Department of Energy can share data and lessons learned from the grid modernization investments made under American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to improve future efforts.
SHRINKING THE FEDERAL CARBON FOOTPRINT
As the nation's largest consumer of energy, the federal government can directly reduce emissions and drive the low-carbon market through its energy-related procurement and practices. In 2010, President Obama set government-wide goals of reducing direct greenhouse gas emissions, such as those from fuels and building energy use, by 28 percent, and indirect emissions, such as those from employee commuting and landfill waste, by 13 percent, by 2020. Achieving these goals by 2020 could result in a cumulative CO2 reduction of 101 million metric tons, or 1.4 percent of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2010. Of particular priority are the Department of Defense's efforts to improve energy efficiency and shift to clean energy sources such as distributed and renewable generation, batteries, and clean transportation fuels, which offer opportunities to reduce security risks, energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions.
CLEAN-ENERGY LEASING ON FEDERAL LANDS
The Department of the Interior oversees extensive public lands in the West with significant wind, solar, and geothermal potential, as well as offshore areas with enormous wind potential. For instance, offshore areas currently proposed for wind lease sales could support more than 4,000 megawatts of wind generation, enough to power an estimated 1.4 million homes. Continued leasing of these federal holdings, and new transmission lines linking them to the existing grid, could substantially increase U.S. clean energy generation.
OPPORTUNITIES IN LEGISLATIVE REAUTHORIZATIONS
The Department of the Interior oversees extensive public lands in the West with significant wind, solar, and geothermal potential, as well as offshore areas with enormous wind potential. For instance, offshore areas currently proposed for wind lease sales could support more than 4,000 megawatts of wind generation, enough to power an estimated 1.4 million homes. Continued leasing of these federal holdings, and new transmission lines linking them to the existing grid, could substantially increase U.S. clean energy generation.
INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT
As the United States strengthens its domestic climate effort, it can also work on the international level to promote stronger action by other major economies. With a fresh round of U.N. climate negotiations now underway, the United States can work to ensure that it produces an agreement in 2015 that is ambitious, balanced, and sensible – one the United States can join. It also can help mobilize complementary efforts alongside the United Nations climate process, such as the new coalition addressing short-lived climate forcers, and work through the International Civil Aviation Organization to deliver a meaningful pact to reduce emissions from aviation.
2)
1. Compliance and competitiveness. Most companies focus on compliance, not competitive advantage—for good reason. Environmental managers would welcome a world in which they could “search exclusively for win-win solutions.” In reality, however, they concentrate on ensuring compliance with current environmental regulations, remediating environmental problems caused by past operations, and anticipating the impact of proposed regulations.
As Walley and Whitehead note, costs in those areas are often enormous, dwarfing potential win-win opportunities. But the authors don’t make it clear that when a Texaco, for example, invests $7 billion in compliance and emissions reductions, a primary motive is to protect its franchise to operate. Recent fines ($5 million against United Technologies, for example) and criminal enforcement (in 1993, 135 individuals received criminal fines and jail time in environmental cases prosecuted by the Justice Department) show that noncompliance can have significant costs.
Moreover, the optimistic tone of today’s corporate environmental rhetoric reflects management’s desire to give its stockholders a unifying vision for a complex array of environmental initiatives. Nevertheless, senior managers are fully aware that many compliance and remediation efforts won’t increase—but will protect—shareholder value. They know that any serious discussion about gaining competitive advantage from environmental issues must emphasize future possibilities.
2. It’s never been easy to be green. The authors claim that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, “companies were able to make easy, but often very significant, improvements” in areas such as emissions reductions. The result, they say, is a belief that future gains will be as easy.
Most companies would be surprised to learn that their environmental achievements have been easy. After all, in the same period, those companies saw compliance costs soar.
3. Keeping up with the Joneses. Walley and Whitehead urge companies to enhance shareholder value by improving “the efficiency and effectiveness of environmental spending.” But their focus on industry-wide statistics for environmental expenditures obscures the key competitive opportunity in those expenditures. Historically, industry has adjusted to the cost of environmental mandates with price adjustments. Companies that can achieve superior efficiency and effectiveness in environmental spending will indeed find themselves in a classic win-win situation—meeting the non-business-driven expectations of the public and the government while besting their competitors’ cost structures.
“Just as the United States set an example with its early environmental legislation, other countries are now pioneering approaches in areas such as packaging and environmental reports.” —J. Ladd Greeno
4. The rest of the world. The authors focus exclusively on the U.S. environmental context. Increasingly, however, the international dimensions of environmental issues are shaping corporate environmental postures. Companies are taking steps to safeguard against environmental liabilities in countries where regulations are now embryonic. And they are examining how measures such as the European Union’s Eco-Management and Audit Scheme will raise “threshold” environmental expectations throughout the world. Just as the United States set an example with its early environmental legislation, other countries are now pioneering approaches in areas such as packaging and environmental reports. As companies globalize their operations, they must account for these developments if they hope to manage environmental costs and opportunities.
3)
PUBLIC HEALTH ACTIONS TO ADDRESS CLIMATE CHANGE
In developing and implementing services to address climate change, public health professionals will need to confront several practical realities. First, the effects of climate change will vary considerably by region. Second, they will vary by population group; not all people are equally susceptible. Third, these effects are highly complex, and planning and action will need to be multidimensional.
Regional variation will play a critical role in public health responses to climate change.72 Although CO2and other greenhouse gases are relatively uniformly distributed in the atmosphere, the human health effects of climate change will vary by region, topography, and capacity for response.31 For example, far northern locations will see relatively dramatic changes in temperature, hydrology, and ecosystem conditions, with effects ranging from infectious disease risk to inadequate health services.73,74 Low-lying coastal regions may face flooding, salt infiltration of fresh water tables, harmful algal blooms, and in some cases severe storms.75–77 The western United States may experience significant strains on water supplies as regional precipitation declines and mountain snowpacks are depleted,78 in turn raising the risk of forest fires.10 As a result, planning for and managing the health impacts of climate change will need to draw on local data and will involve local and regional authorities and health care providers.
Health disparities are well recognized in public health and clinical practice, and a central tenet of public health is that such disparities need to be eliminated. One contributor to health disparities is environmental risks that disproportionately threaten certain populations, especially poor people and members of ethnic and racial minority groups—the basis of environmental justice advocacy.79,80 Climate change is expected to perpetuate health disparities in this way.81 Events such as Hurricane Katrina highlighted the vulnerability of the poor in New Orleans, La,82–84 and on a global scale, people in poor countries will face greater health risks, with fewer resources and less resiliency than will those in wealthy nations.67,68,85–88Public health action on climate change must include vulnerability assessments, identification of the most vulnerable populations, and a focus on eliminating health disparities.
Complexity is a cardinal feature of climate change. Vast numbers of factors influence meteorological systems, many feedback loops operate, and sufficient data needed for a full evaluation are rarely available. The same is true of the health impacts of climate change. These effects will unfold over coming decades against a backdrop of other changes: demographic shifts including population growth and an aging population, increasing scarcity of fossil fuels, continuing migration to Southern and Southwestern states, and urbanization. To grapple successfully with this complexity, public health scientists will need to engage in systems thinking89 and learn and apply techniques such as system dynamics modeling.90
The recognition of these 3 realities—geographic variability, population variability, and complexity—set the stage for considering public health actions to address climate change based on the following 10 essential services of public health.
Monitor Health Status to Identify and Solve Community Health Problems
Information is key to a responsive and functioning public health system. Data from public health surveillance or tracking systems are used to determine disease burdens and trends, identify vulnerable or affected people and places, recognize disease clusters, and plan, implement, and evaluate public health interventions.91 When these data are systematically collected, analyzed, interpreted, and disseminated, they guide the design of effective public health interventions and the judicious use of public health resources.
To respond to climate change, several categories of data—on environmental risks, vulnerability, and disease—are needed. Examples of risk data include meteorological data (such as temperature trends) and ecological data (such as mosquito density). Indicators of vulnerability include not only physical factors such as elevation, urban infrastructure, loss of forest cover, and prevalence of household air conditioning,92–95 but also social factors such as isolation and poverty.96 One example, the Climate Vulnerability Index, focuses on susceptibility to floods using a combination of factors measured at the local level.94 Disease surveillance is a traditional public health function; data systems for infectious diseases known to be linked to climate variability, including foodborne15 and waterborne97,98 diseases, need to be strengthened.
These data—on risk, vulnerability, and disease—are often collected at different spatial scales and through different methods. It is essential that they be harmonized and integrated. Epidemic early warning systems combine clinical data such as emergency department and outpatient clinic syndromic surveillance with climate data, vector biology data, clinical laboratory data, veterinary data, telephone hotline call tracking, pharmaceutical use data, and other data.99–103 Such systems exist in many parts of the world for vector-borne,104–107 foodborne,108,109 water-borne,110 and respiratory111 diseases and for acts of terrorism.112 Such early warning systems need to be evaluated and strengthened.113–115 In the United States, the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program is a comprehensive approach to collecting and integrating data on environmental exposures, human body burdens, and diseases.116,117This program needs to expand in terms of the number of participating jurisdictions, data elements collected, integration of diverse data sources, and greater spatial resolution of the data. This will enable health authorities to understand more clearly the associations among long-term climate changes, weather events, ecological changes, and direct and indirect health outcomes.
Diagnose and Investigate Health Problems and Hazards in the Community
Identifying, investigating, and explaining health problems at the population level remain classic public health responsibilities—the community equivalent of a physician’s diagnostic workups of patients. These functions, which flow directly from the previous task (monitoring health status), are well established in public health. However, climate change will require enhanced diagnostic and investigative capacity throughout the health system. For example, ecological changes may alter traditional vector-borne disease dynamics, possibly redefining animal hosts, vectors, and disease outcomes at the local and regional scales. Techniques that help assess health vulnerability to climate change have been proposed and offer a proactive approach to diagnosis.47 The capacity of public health laboratories must be enhanced to allow rapid diagnosis and reporting of diseases that are reintroduced or alter their distribution.
An example of such investigation comes from British Columbia, where an outbreak of Cryptococcus gattii, formerly considered a tropical organism, was observed in 2001.118,119 Investigation of the outbreak, a collaborative effort of a university and a provincial center for disease control, included such innovative sampling techniques as testing of air, soil, trees, garden waste, vehicle wheel wells, and the shoes of personnel participating in sampling, and it required laboratory capacity to culture the organism and identify it using the methods of restriction fragment length polymorphism.120
A component of diagnosis and investigation is attribution—determining the extent to which health problems can be attributed to climate change. Understanding attribution will help in developing the most effective and cost-effective strategies for health system response. Methods for estimating the health burden of climate change use techniques analogous to risk assessment.39,121 These methods need further development and application.
Inform, Educate, and Empower People About Health Issues
Most Americans believe that climate change is already having effects, and a large and increasing plurality report that they worry about it “a great deal.” However, only 1 in 5 reports understanding climate change very well. Moreover, Americans are equally divided among those who believe that media coverage of climate change is exaggerated, correct, and underestimated.122 There is a high and growing level of concern, but clearly public understanding of climate change is incomplete, and a majority lacks confidence in information presented in the media.
This situation, which is familiar to health professionals, in many ways reflects public views of health and illness. The need to inform, educate, and empower people about health is critical, and experience with smoking cessation, HIV prevention, physical activity promotion, and other health issues has yielded rich insights into effective health communication.123,124 However, little of this insight has been applied to climate change.125–128
Effective health communication on climate change will inform the public and policymakers about potential health effects and about steps that can be taken to reduce risk. The communication needs to be targeted to specific groups, accounting for varying levels of understanding, cultural and ethnic differences, vulnerability to the health effects of climate change, and other factors. Messages should empower people to access and use necessary health resources. Since frightening scenarios may elicit despair and helplessness, it is important to design messages that minimize these responses and that lead instead to constructive behaviors. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency offers a “What You Can Do” Web page129that provides tips for use at home, at the office, on the road, and at school, together with user-friendly tools such as a personal greenhouse gas emissions calculator. Other nations may provide useful models. For example, Health Canada offers the Canadian public a regular publication called Your Health and a Changing Climate, a user-friendly Web site,130 and other information channels. Research on the most effective means of communication is needed, and once implemented, communication strategies should be evaluated for efficacy.
Mobilize Community Partnerships to Identify and Solve Health Problems
Responding to the health challenges posed by climate change requires a multilevel, interdisciplinary, and integrated response, so efforts should focus on developing partnerships among federal, state, and local government agencies, academia, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector. Many of these partnerships must evolve at the local and state levels, because identifying health threats and vulnerable populations, designing and implementing adaptive measures, and responding to emergencies occur largely at those scales.
Although existing relationships with traditional public health partners should be strengthened, new collaborations must be developed. Leading examples include collaborations with architects and city planners (whose design work can reduce energy demand and limit vulnerability to heat, flooding, and other risks), transportation planners (who can design transportation systems that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote safe, healthy travel), and the faith community (which shares an emphasis on long-term stewardship and can help disseminate public health information). For example, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment131 identifies human health as a central issue in climate change, offering a firm basis for collaboration with public health agencies.
Develop Policies and Plans That Support Individual and Community Health Efforts
National policy on the mitigation of climate change will likely evolve in coming years. Although responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions lies outside the health arena, health input is appropriate in at least 2 ways. First, health professionals can explain the health rationale for climate change mitigation in terms of reduced morbidity and mortality. Second, health scientists can provide evidence on the health impacts of various approaches to climate change mitigation (including cobenefits and disbenefits),132 using such techniques as health impact assessment.53,54 Such input will help produce decisions that best protect public health.
The health sector should play a major role in developing plans that address health threats related to climate change. For example, cities at risk of heat waves need preparedness plans133,134 that provide early warnings, educate the public and health care providers, identify vulnerable people and places,135implement health surveillance,136 create buddy systems and other rescue plans, identify shelter facilities, ensure that backup generators are available and supplied with fuel, prepare transport and evacuation plans, and prepare clinical facilities to deliver appropriate care, including surge capacity.137 Similar plans are needed for severe weather events,138 infectious disease outbreaks, and other health threats. A good example is the Hospital Safety Index proposed by the Pan-American Health Organization, to help plan and achieve “hospitals safe from disasters.”139 Health data can inform the design of “climate-proof” housing, enhanced infectious disease control programs, early warning systems, and other plans. Public health authorities need to collaborate with other agencies, such as those responsible for law enforcement and emergency response, in planning and exercising. Initiatives in Portland, Ore,140 and Seattle, Wash,141exemplify local health department engagement in such planning.
Other policies and plans are internal to the health system, relating to the operation of health facilities. The health sector, like many other industries, can examine its own contributions to climate change and work to reduce them. Hospitals and clinics can be designed, built, and operated in ways that lower energy demand, reduce their waste streams, and link with local transit systems to cut driving by staff, patients, and visitors. “Green purchasing” refers to preferential purchasing of environmentally friendly supplies and equipment, another set of strategies to reduce health sector contribution to climate change. The British National Health Service has adopted these approaches as policy,142 and technical advice is available to US health organizations in the peer-reviewed literature143 in sources such as the Green Guide for Health Care,144from organizations such as Hospitals for a Healthy Environment145 and from private architects and consultants.
Enforce Laws and Regulations That Protect Health and Ensure Safety
Few public health laws and regulations have a direct bearing on climate change. However, public health can provide science-based input regarding laws and regulations in the environmental, transportation, and energy arenas. As policies are codified, there may be roles for state and local public health agencies in enforcing such policies as building codes, water quality regulations, and air quality laws.
Link People to Needed Health Services and Ensure Provision of Care
A strong infrastructure for delivering health care services must be part of the health response to climate change. To prepare for disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and heat waves, support is needed for developing local, regional, and national emergency medical systems and enhancing their disaster response capacity, including specialized services and surge capacity. These requirements are included as part of the National Response Plan under Emergency Support Function No. 8, called Public Health and Medical Services.146 Although disaster medical planning often focuses on trauma care, disasters may interrupt ongoing care for diseases such as HIV infection and renal failure, routine laboratory testing such as newborn screening, and other services, all of which must be restored. System failures during and after Hurricane Katrina made clear the need for effective, coordinated approaches for delivering clinical services.147–150
In the context of climate change, mental health services may be an important component of health service delivery. The mental health burden following acute disasters is considerable,151–155 especially for high-risk groups such as children.156,157 In addition, the long-term stresses of climate change—living with uncertainty, environmental threats, and alterations in familiar habitats and habits—may impose a chronic mental health burden.158–163 The health system needs the capacity for rapid needs assessment, mental health service delivery, and long-term follow-up.164
Ensure a Competent Public and Personal Health Care Workforce
A trained and competent workforce is central to the success of the health system.165 Preparing the health workforce for the potential impacts of climate change and for a host of other challenges over the coming decades will require a concerted effort at the local, state, and federal levels. It will involve ensuring a basic set of competencies throughout the system and developing a cadre of scientists with multidisciplinary, specialized skills in nontraditional fields.
Medical care providers should be trained to recognize and manage emerging health threats that may be associated with climate change. For public health professionals, training networks need to provide a systematic approach to training, linked directly to essential services and needs as identified by local and state health officials. Partnerships should be developed between health science schools and other academic institutions to provide cutting-edge education for health professionals in nontraditional subjects such as economics, health impact assessments, ecology, urban health, and vulnerability modeling. It is critical that the health system develop a wider range of expertise at every level to respond adequately to the challenges of climate change. Health professional training in climate change can be found at several universities; examples include Harvard’s course on human health and global environmental change166 and the University of Wisconsin’s graduate certificate on humans and the global environment.167
Evaluate Effectiveness, Accessibility, and Quality of Health Services
As they work to reduce the health impacts of climate change, health professionals must demonstrate accountability for the effectiveness, accessibility, and quality of programs and interventions. The evaluation of preparedness plans, health communication strategies, and other initiatives not only helps improve public health efforts, but it can also facilitate communication with key community stakeholders.
Evaluation requires robust surveillance capacity, a well-trained public health workforce, and established, efficient, reliable systems for sharing information among different levels of government and parts of the health sector. It also requires a periodic inventory of available services and assessment of the degree to which those services are accessible to the most vulnerable populations they are designed to serve. As with many other essential public health services, evaluation activities related to climate change and health will have cobenefits with other important public health activities and will likely exhibit synergistic effects in strengthening the nation’s public health system.
Search for New Insights and Innovative Solutions to Health Problems
Several lines of health research are needed to provide data-based support for public health action on climate change.168,169 These include empirical research on the association between climate change and health, scenario development to forecast health impacts and vulnerabilities, and development and testing of strategies to reduce risk. For each intervention, research is needed on the level of public health protection produced and on attendant costs.
4)5 Ways to Protect the Rights of Future Generations
We often talk about the rights of women, immigrants, and animals. Yet the rights of future generations are rarely mentioned, despite the fact that their very ability to exist is threatened by our actions today. Perhaps, if the needs and rights of future people were legally recognized, it might give us the impetus to stop projects that threaten the climate and the survival of future peoples.
Because women’s voices have been largely left out of political discussions, our contribution might add insight lacking in current policies.
That was the thought that led Carolyn Raffensperger, a lawyer and executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, to call for women across the country to join her at the Women’s Congress for Future Generations in Moab, Utah. Raffensperger and her co-organizers chose to invite women (although men were also invited) because, as producer Christy Williams-Dunton said, they “are the first environment for every [living] thing that comes through.” This gives women a sense of responsibility for the nurturing of life, she added. And because women’s voices have been largely left out of political discussions, our contribution might add insight lacking in current policies.
Meanwhile, event organizers chose Moab as the setting because, as the home of sacred sites endangered by both fracking and the mining of tar sands, it heightened our sense of urgency. Plus, Moab’s gorgeous red-rock desert and breathtaking formations like Delicate Arch—which a group of us hiked to under the light of the full moon—seemed an inspirational place for discussion on how to protect nature.
The plan, announced via email and the conference website, was to get together and brainstorm the things we’d need to do in order to ensure a livable future for the generations to come. Because the well-being of ecosystem and future people require some sort of legal framework in order to demand respect, it was decided that we would use the language of “rights” to do this, a strategy that has been successfully employed by groups like the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. We would outline the rights of humans, animals, plants—even rivers—and then hammer our ideas into a Declaration of Rights for Future Generations. It wouldn't be the first time such a document had been produced—the United Nations wrote one in 1997, Adbusters magazine published one in 2008, and Jacques Cousteau's "Bill of Rights for Future Generations" has gathered nine million signatures. Ours, however, would be the first to emerge from a conversation among women.
Such a broad expansion of legal rights might sound like a flower child’s fantasy, but it’s grounded in hard science. Every schoolchild learns that ecosystems are interdependent. Yet our society continues to behave as though humans can survive the destruction of forests, the pollution of groundwater, and the warming of the climate. We need to take a hard look at our legal system—the code that defines which behaviors are and aren’t OK—and revise its systems of rights so that it protects whole ecosystems and all the species within them, from the top of the food chain to the bottom.
The rights of ecosystems and the rights of future generations are inherently connected. Future generations will depend on the ecosystems we are caring for today, and, because they will be our descendents, considering their point of view helps us see what's at stake in the protection of those ecosystems.
However, they lack a political voice, which Raffensperger calls one of the critical civil rights issues of our time. Such rights are just one of the ideas the women gathered in Moab came up with in several days of debate and conversation. I’ve collected the five most revolutionary ones here.
1. Recognize nature’s inherent right to exist
Existing legal structures view nature as a commodity or, at best, a “service provider,” rather than as a community of living entities. We must accept that nature has the right to exist for its own sake.
Laws recognizing the rights of nature are already emerging. Rights of nature have taken root in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia, and in local ordinances in more than 100 communities across the United States, especially those dealing with fracking. Such laws recognize nature as more than a resource, and acknowledge that ecosystems and species have the right to exist for their own sake, not only for the sake of humans. By helping whole ecosystems to thrive, these laws ultimately ensure a healthier world for all.
2. Reserve political rights for living beings, not corporations
Corporations’ rights too often trump those of humans, let alone other living beings. Our declaration holds that corporations’ privileges should be limited and able to be revoked if they violate the rights of present and future communities. Rather than being liable to their shareholders alone, corporations would be liable to all whom their actions affect. Oversight agencies, accountable only to the people, could revoke a corporation’s charter if they deem its actions irresponsible.
Rather than allowing corporations to buy and sell nature at whim, land, water, and ecosystems will be held as the commons, a concept that even Western culture has accepted until the relatively recent commodification of nature for industrial use. In other words, a community wouldn’t own a river, but could use it in a sustainable way. No person or company would have the right to pollute water or use it at the expense of others. Other species would also share rights to the water.
3. Build economies that benefit the world they inhabit
The women of the conference agreed that economic activity must benefit, not destroy, the natural world. In most workplaces today, economic activity has become estranged from environmental consciousness. A healthy system of governance must recognize that the value placed on human activity must take into consideration the long-term effects of that activity on future generations.
Practices such as tar sands mining and fracking—which are profitable only because of invisible clean-up costs future generations will have to pay—would be outlawed if those generations’ rights were part of the law. Careful organic farming is a good example of the kind of industries that would replace them, as organic farms actually improve the quality of their soil and usually preserve woodlots that help encourage biodiversity.
4. Practice restorative justice
Restorative justice provides an effective way of remediating environmental destruction because it changes the perpetrator’s worldview.
Restorative justice must be used to prevent and address environmental destruction. In the context of environmental justice, this practice would involve the perpetrator of an ecological crime in the remediation process. It also recognizes the root causes of the injustice and considers the crime’s effect on the community as a whole, rather than on an individual victim.
In the case of ecocide—destruction of an ecosystem—the perpetrator would work to remediate the ecosystem. We decided that restorative justice provides the most effective way of remediating environmental destruction because it changes the perpetrator’s worldview and cultivates recognition of the interdependence between humans and the rest of nature. New institutions, such as guardians of nature and guardians of future generations, will allow for the enforcement of such rights.
5. Organize through radical inclusion
The topic of radical inclusion permeated discussion throughout drafting of the declaration. As women taking a greater role within our political and legal system, how do we keep ourselves from claiming power at the expense of other groups of people? Furthermore, how do we ensure that the rights we choose reflect the needs and wants of all humans and future generations as accurately as possible?
Only through diversity of participation—that is, radical inclusiveness—in the drafting of the declaration could we accomplish this, and many of us felt that the conference could have benefited from more diversity, especially in terms of class and race. Organizer Hénia Belalia explains that her plan to address that problem, saying, “Our intention is to carry this work forward in a way that honors bringing more voices, a growing diversity of opinions and experiences, to the process.”
Being radically inclusive about the rights of other living beings and ecosystems involves using the platinum rule, which holds that we must treat other beings as they want to be treated, one woman said during the drafting of the declaration. This ensures that we consider other living beings and nature as equals, rather than as existing for our own use.
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