GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY DECLARATION

A Model Declaration for Endorsement by Your Healthcare Association

Physicians and other healthcare professionals 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.

A Model
"Global Climate Change Emergency Declaration"

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A MODEL GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY DECLARATION

In view of the fact that nations are currently negotiating a global climate change treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol (expiring in 2012) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with a deadline of December 2009 in Copenhagen, and

Concerned that

• leading public 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";


• death 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 (IPCC, Red Cross/Red Crescent, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs);


• corals and other marine life cannot survive the rapid warming and acidification of the ocean;


• climate change is now happening far more rapidly than the IPCC models indicated, and global greenhouse gas emissions are above the IPCC's worst-case scenario — and accelerating (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 eventual level of warming will last several hundred years; and


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

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I/We agree that the "health and healthcare communities can and must use their influence to help avert the catastrophic effects of climate change" [1], and

I/We call on our healthcare professional associations

• 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.

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[1] Adapted from It's Time to Take Action on Climate Change by the Faculty of Public Health, Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom

Click the link below to download a PDF version of this model
Global Climate Change Emergency Declaration, in order to endorse it and share it with your colleagues, professional associations and elected officials for their endorsement.
(You can print it or forward it as an attachment.)

A MODEL GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY DECLARATION

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