Canadian doctors push for action

Summer of record-breaking heat and wildfires drove home need for response at national level

As global leaders prepare to meet for the first dedicated health day at a UN climate summit, Canadian doctors plan to use the platform to push for a new federal office dedicated to addressing the health effects of climate change.

The president of a major national physicians group says a summer of record-breaking heat and air-polluting wildfires drove home the urgent need for decision-makers to organize a pan-Canadian response.

A proposed national “climate and health secretariat” would work across governments to chart a course to a climate-resilient and low-carbon healthcare system, said Dr. Kathleen Ross, president of the Canadian Medical Association.

“We recognize that the solution to our climate crisis isn’t uniquely poised in just one silo of the government,” said Ross.

Sunday will mark the first time a UN climate summit, known this year as COP28, will dedicate a day to exploring the links between health and climate change, which the World Health Organization labelled the greatest health risk of the 21st century.

“Climate change is really a health threat multiplier, and I think that’s the message we need to bring,” said Ross, who is attending COP28.

Doctors and climate scientists say Canada has already seen harrowing examples of how a warming world will affect health care.

More than 600 people died heat-related deaths under British Columbia’s 2021 heat dome. Unprecedented wildfires this summer choked the air with pollutants, pausing school activities and creating heightened risks for people with asthma and heart disease. Yellowknife’s hospital, along with the rest of the city, was evacuated under threat of encroaching flames.

If the planet were a patient, Dr. Courtney Howard says she would be moving it to the trauma room.

“Phasing out fossil fuels is the most important treatment,” said Howard, an emergency physician in Yellowknife who is also the head of the International Society of Doctors for the Environment’s delegation to COP28.

Framing the climate crisis as also a health-care crisis “completely changes the stakes” of the issue, said Howard. It makes tangible climate change’s far-reaching and direct effects on human health, from the food we eat to the air we breathe, she said.

“I also have an obligation and a responsibility to advocate for health public policy on behalf of my patient population,” said Howard.

But Canada needs to do more to make sure its health-care system isn’t exacerbating the problem, Howard said. While the federal government signed on at COP26 two years ago in Glasgow to a pledge to develop a low-carbon and resilient health-care system, Howard said, “we have barely got started on implementing it.”

“We don’t even really have official stats on where we’re at right now in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, let alone a plan to get us to net-zero,” she said.

Doctors also stress climate change is exacerbating healthcare inequities.

“It’s also people who are living in poverty and maybe can’t afford an air conditioner or perhaps can’t afford to run their air conditioner because of the cost of electricity,” said Dr. Samantha Green, a family physician in Toronto’s downtown Regent Park neighbourhood and the president-elect of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

“It’s people who are living in dense, usually racialized neighbourhoods which lack adequate tree cover — and in these urban heat islands, temperatures can be up to 12 degrees hotter than surrounding neighbourhoods.”

Green says while she supports the idea of a climate and health secretariat, she hopes the idea doesn’t “overshadow the fundamental importance of … phasing out fossil fuels” at the COP28 conference.

“That’s the most important action that Canada can take.”