In this harsh light, millions of health professionals have called for a healthy recovery that focuses on climate prevention strategies that reduce the global economy’s reliance on fossil fuels while investing in clean, renewable energy and low-carbon health systems. Certainly, COVID, together with the wildfires, floods and other manifestations of a growing climate emergency, have made it abundantly clear that we need to retool healthcare to be both pandemic prepared and climate-ready. Yet while the pandemic rages on as the most serious health crisis in a century, perhaps the greatest health threat that both people and the planet face today is not the coronavirus, but rather the looming climate emergency.Ī growing movement in the health sector, ranging from the nurses and doctors on local hospital wards up to the World Health Organization (WHO), recognizes that the climate crisis is a health crisis that could ultimately dwarf the impact of the pandemic. This is the second Earth Day we have “celebrated” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Providing transparency on the implications of these choices, such as presented in this paper, may help governments to do so.A roadmap to zero emissions healthcare By Josh Karliner | April 22, 2021 Such choices have to be made depending on how calculation results are to be used by policymakers when negotiating a future international climate agreement. The results presented in this paper show the importance of the choices made when calculating the historical contributions by the various countries. From a scientific perspective, all greenhouse gases should preferably be included, as well as the most recent emission trends, as was done in the reference calculations included in this study. This significantly changes the historical relative contributions by many countries, altering their overall relative contributions by a multiplicative factor that ranges from 0.15 to 1.5, compared to reference values (reference calculations cover the 1850–2010 period and include all greenhouse gas emissions). This increases the relative contribution by developed countries as a group to as much as 80%. Another variant, one that is often used by experts from developing countries, excludes recent emissions (2000–2010), non-CO 2 greenhouse gases, and CO 2 from land-use change and forestry.
This variant takes into account the fact that emerging economies benefit from existing technologies developed elsewhere. The total contribution by the developed countries as a group during the 1850–2010 period came to 48%. Developed countriesĬontributions to cumulative greenhouse gas emissions (percentage) according to the reference calculations, including all greenhouse gas emissions, cover the 1850–2010 period Countries’ contributions vary according to the choices made in calculation methodsĭiscounting historical emissions for technological progress, for example, reduces the relative contributions by some developed countries and increases those by certain developing countries. Hence, somewhere during the current decade, the share of the cumulative historical emissions in developing countries will surpass that of the developed countries. By 2020, the share of developing countries will probably amount to 51%. The group of developed countries was responsible for 52%. Taking into account all greenhouse gas emissions emitted during the 1850–2010 period, the relative contribution by developing countries to global cumulative emissions was 48%. Developing countries’ contributions to climate change approach 50%
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