GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY DECLARATION

A "Medical Emergency Model" Declaration
for Endorsement by Your Health Care Association and Other Concerned
Professional Organizations

Health care professionals and their associations, along with religious and human rights organizations concerned about climate change, have the influence and the means to call for their governments to acknowledge and declare that global climate change is an emergency for vulnerable regional populations, for the generation of today's children, and for all future generations.

They can demand an emergency zero-carbon response for the rapid transition to a clean, zero-carbon, everlasting energy future — the only viable and sustainable future humanity has.
(See 350.org's Moving Planet project.)

Click here to join Climate Change Emergency Medical Response and to endorse this Climate Change Emergency Declaration.

What follows is a declaration:

• for these climate change concerned organizations to adopt;


• to be sent to all levels of government;


• to send to the UNFCCC Secretariat;


• for citizens to use in making submissions (for example, when calling for zero carbon zones or carbon-free zones) to municipal councils and regional governments;


• to be used for writing articles for the media and letters to the editor.

A "MEDICAL EMERGENCY MODEL" GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY DECLARATION

In view of the fact that nations are currently stalled in negotiating a global climate change treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol (expiring in 2012) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and

Alarmed that

• leading health authorities have stated that climate
  change (already dramatically affecting human health around the world) is the health challenge of the 21st century, and that unless decisive action is taken now, the world will face "global public health and environmental catastrophe" (UK Faculty of Public Health, American Public Health Association, British Medical Association);


• the United Nations Environment Program 2007 Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-4) warned that major ongoing global environmental issues plus climate change will "affect the survival and human well-being of both present and future generations";


• deaths and disasters due to global climate change are already impacting the most vulnerable regional populations (especially children), who are also the most socio-economically deprived and least able to adapt (Global Humanitarian Forum, IPCC, Red Cross/Red Crescent, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs);


• research published by leading climate scientists shows that Arctic summer sea ice is disappearing and Arctic methane is emitting; both feedbacks put the Earth in peril and threaten to unleash a planetary cataclysm;


• increases in atmospheric CO2 levels are accelerating and methane is spiking due to carbon feedbacks;


• corals and other marine life will not survive the rapid warming and acidification of the ocean (there is already a 40 percent drop in phytoplankton populations);


• CO2 emissions have been tracking the worst case IPCC scenario;


• climate change is now happening far more rapidly than the IPCC models indicated (see CCEMR State of the Climate);


• recently published research shows that it is now practically too late to prevent a global warming of over 2ºC and that the level of warming will last over 1000 years;


• global greenhouse gas emissions must be slowed, stopped and reversed by 2015 at the very latest to avoid irreversible climate catastrophe (IPCC Fourth Assessment, 2007);

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I/We agree that the "Health care and related other professional organization, religious and human rights organizations can and must use their influence to help avert and mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change" [1].

I/We call on our healthcare (and other) organizations

• to declare that we are beyond "dangerous interference with the climate system" (UNFCCC Objective) in terms of population health and mortality, and food and water security; and


• to declare a state of global climate change emergency on behalf of today's climate-change-vulnerable populations, the generation of today's children, and all future generations, demanding an emergency-scale international response.

I/We call on our municipal councils and regional governments

• to declare that we are beyond "dangerous interference with the climate system" (UNFCCC Objective) in terms of population health and mortality, and food and water security of huge vulnerable populations and future generations; and


• to declare a state of global climate change emergency on behalf of today's climate-change-vulnerable populations, the generation of today's children, and all future generations, demanding an immediate and urgent emergency-scale international response.

I/We call on our national governments

• to comply in full with the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and to make the above declarations the basis of their policy in the current negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

I/We demand an emergency transition to a clean, zero-carbon, everlasting energy future — the only future humanity has.

Specifically, I/we demand immediate action to stop all the enormous subsidies going to the fossil fuel industries and to switch the direct subsidies to clean, zero-carbon energy industries.

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[1] Adapted from Sustaining a Healthy Future: Taking Action on Climate Change by the Faculty of Public Health, Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom

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