Inaction On Climate Change Is Greatest Threat To Health, 220 Medical Journals Warn

Runaway climate change risks "catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse," the editorial reads.

A coalition of more than 220 of the planet’s leading medical and public health journals issued an urgent rallying cry to address climate change on Sunday, saying the greatest threat to global health was the planet’s ongoing failure to rein in carbon emissions. The editors of the journals wrote the impassioned joint plea, warning humanity was already facing irreversible threats to public health just weeks before the United Nations is set to meet for its general assembly later this month. The threat was so urgent, they wrote, that countries can’t wait for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic to begin reducing emmissions. “Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades,” the call, published in journals including the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine and the British Medical Journal, reads. “The science is unequivocal: a global increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.”