Mission of
Climate Change Emergency
Medical Response

Leading health professionals and organizations have observed that the world urgently needs a worldwide medical response to the deteriorating planetary climate change emergency.

CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY MEDICAL RESPONSE provides the online resources for this most vital emergency response ever.

Scientists, clinicians, and public health professionals have called for attention to climate change on both practical and ethical grounds. Several well-established principles point to a vigorous, proactive public health approach to climate change. But this is not happening.

— Howard Frumkin, MD, DrPH,
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
to the American Public Health Association, March 2008

Mission

The main mission of CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY MEDICAL RESPONSE is to secure a SAFE GLOBAL CLIMATE for today's children worldwide and for future generations.

GLOBAL "CLIMATE SAFETY" FIRST

First, Do No Harm
— The Hippocratic Ethic

Our hope is to catalyze an international
DECLARATION OF THE GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
STATE OF EMERGENCY led by the health care community.

Our intention is to focus discussions of global climate change on the worst risks to the most vulnerable populations, rather than the current approach of assessing the most likely impacts based on computer model projections. We also want to lobby for the inclusion of carbon feedbacks in scientific assessments of global climate change — especially the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Our goal is to provide a medical definition of "dangerous interference with the climate system" to inform the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations.

Our mission is ...

• to speak out strongly for the health care ethic of precaution, which should be given first priority in planning and policy making for the protection of human population health from global climate change, for this and all future generations;


• to provide a one-stop planetary emergency response site for health and healing professionals;


• to educate health and healing professionals about the unprecedented planetary emergency of global climate change, to enable them to educate their professional associations and policy makers at all levels;


• to contribute to a global response of health professionals who will inform, on a purely scientific (nonpolitical) basis, leaders of government, institutions and professions that there is now
  • a huge risk to the survival of large regional climate-change-vulnerable populations (eg, in Africa)
  • a high risk to the sustainability of civilization, and
  • a real risk to the very survival of humanity;
  
  
• to strengthen the influence and ability of health professionals to sound the alarm for the rights of vulnerable regional populations and future generations to live safe from the risks of disastrous and catastrophic global climate change, through dissemination of what they have learned.


• to provide a continually updated state of the climate based on the most current peer-reviewed published literature; and


• to disseminate a statement in support of a planetary climate change emergency declaration.

Doctors can lead from the front — just as we did when we came to understand the evidence of the harmful effects of smoking.... Doctors can understand. We can change the world by speaking up and acting — together and individually — internationally, nationally, and locally....

— Richard Smith, Editor, British Medical Journal (1997)

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