Hayley Bennett’s research while affiliated with Health New Zealand and other places

This article is available open access at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32985-X Climate change is a global health emergency and a growing ethical crisis, and well planned climate action brings opportunities to improve health, equity, and human rights. In the face of continued inaction, citizens are turning to civil disobedience to persuade governments to act more urgently. Civil disobedience is public, non-violent action in breach of the law, which is aimed at changing the law or policies of the government. Such action is an act of conscience, and participants accept possible punishment. Health professionals are beginning to advocate for and participate in these actions. Several movements for social change have taken civil disobedience action, but participation by health workers in their professional capacity could involve risks, and relatively little has been written to assist decision making about whether to participate. In this Viewpoint, we apply a framework to guide decision making by considering whether climate change justifies civil disobedience by health professionals as part of our duty of care. The framework comes from a western ethics paradigm, and we acknowledge that many people who relate to this paradigm are relatively protected from early climate–health effects. This protection is not the case for many other people, especially those in climate-vulnerable countries and Indigenous communities. Nonetheless, the framework includes principles that are common currency for health professionals.

Health and wellbeing have been largely ignored in discussions around climate change targets and action to date. The current public consultation around New Zealand's post-2020 climate target is an opportunity for health professionals to highlight the health implications of climate change. Without urgent global efforts to bring down global GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, the world is heading towards high levels of global warming, which will have devastating impacts on human health and wellbeing. New Zealand's action to bring down GHG emissions (as part of the global effort) has potential to improve health and reduce costs on the health sector, if health and fairness are put at the centre of policies to address climate change. New Zealand should commit to at least 40 % reductions in GHG emissions by 2030, and zero carbon emissions before 2050, with healthy and fair policies across sectors to enable reaching these targets.

Climate change is widely regarded as one of the most serious global health threats of the 21st century. Its impacts will be disproportionately borne by the most disadvantaged populations, including indigenous peoples. For Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand, as with other indigenous peoples worldwide, colonization has led to dispossession of land, destabilization of cultural foundations, and social, economic, and political marginalization. Climate change threatens to exacerbate these processes, adding future insult to historical and contemporary injury. Yet the challenges posed by climate change are accompanied by considerable opportunities to advance indigenous rights and reduce health disparities. In this paper, we examine issues related to climate change and Māori health using a right to health analytical framework, which identifies obligations for the New Zealand government. Copyright © 2014 Jones, Bennett, Keating, Blaiklock. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Human-caused climate change poses an increasingly serious and urgent threat to health and health equity. Under all the climate projections reported in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment, New Zealand will experience direct impacts, biologically mediated impacts, and socially mediated impacts on health. These will disproportionately affect populations that already experience disadvantage and poorer health. Without rapid global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (particularly from fossil fuels), the world will breach its carbon budget and may experience high levels of warming (land temperatures on average 4-7 degrees Celsius higher by 2100). This level of climate change would threaten the habitability of some parts of the world because of extreme weather, limits on working outdoors, and severely reduced food production. However, well-planned action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could bring about substantial benefits to health, and help New Zealand tackle its costly burden of health inequity and chronic disease.