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With planetary health and human health inextricably linked, the health sector has a vital role to play in advocating for robust climate action from our policy makers.
A perspective published in the Medical Journal of Australia has called on policy makers to prioritise the health and wellbeing of Australians through robust climate policy.
The authors have argued that the health sector must take on a leadership role in championing climate action from a health perspective, to combat the growing health inequities Australians are facing in a changing climate.
“In this perspective article, we relay the urgency — identified by researchers, senior bureaucrats, politicians, former business leaders and civil society groups in a Planetary Health Equity Hothouse Policy Symposium — for transforming the consumptogenic system, with a focus on economic models, policy coherence, and advocacy,” the authors wrote.
Energy policy as health policy
The authors welcomed the increasing focus on health and climate evidenced in Australia’s National Health and Climate Strategy, which was launched in December 2023.
“Having a health and climate strategy for Australia provides an important signal from government that these issues are connected and require action,” they wrote.
However, they note that the strategy fails to recognise the role of energy policy in health policy, specifically the impact that fossil fuel extraction has on health outcomes.
“Unfortunately, the health in all policies objective of the strategy misses the opportunity to tackle the common structural drivers of health inequities and climate change: to do that would require climate change mitigation across sectors, especially energy,” the authors wrote.
Building a wellbeing economy
The authors argue that an economy based on exponential growth is incompatible with Australia’s climate objectives and contributes to economic and health inequities.
“Climate policy progress in Australia has been hampered by the dominance of short term national economic security discourse and by corporate influence in climate change and energy policy making,” the authors wrote.
“These political economy and commercial interest factors have also been identified as undermining and obfuscating the consideration of health co-benefits in the development of mitigation policies in Australia.”
The authors highlight a growing movement calling for a “wellbeing economy” that prioritises human and planetary health.
“The work of this movement demonstrates that a more inclusive and sustainable economy that prioritises activities because they meet the needs of people and planet, not growth for its own sake, is both possible and desirable,” the authors wrote.
“To achieve planetary health equity, economic policy must be designed in a way that ensures a fair social foundation, economic environments operating within the ecological ceiling, and a normative shift away from harmful consumptogenic systems.”
Demanding more action from policy makers
The perspective authors urge the health community to make their voices heard as Australia prepares to update its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) reports.
“As Australia prepares its updated NDC for submission in 2025, the Climate Change Authority’s broad consultative approach and attention to wellbeing indicators provide hope for a more progressive approach commensurate with the scale of intersecting crises of climate change, social and health inequities,” the authors wrote.
“Proactive and ongoing input from the health community to the Climate Change Authority’s work will be essential to the successful embedding of planetary health equity considerations into the Australian NDCs, which could in turn support other countries to commit to much greater ambition in their NDCs.”
“The health community must urge the Minister for Health to use their political capital created through the launching of the health and climate strategy at COP28 and help their ministerial colleagues see that the actions in their portfolios matter for human health and health equity,” the authors concluded.
Read the perspective in the Medical Journal of Australia.
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The findings of ‘The EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health’ make it clear that the current meat-centric diet is incompatible with planetary health and health equity.