Global Climate and Health Summit will take place during COP25 in Madrid, Spain
At UN Climate Conference COP25, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA) will convene a one-day summit on climate and health. This will be the latest in the series of summits for health civil society that have been held since COP 17 in Durban.
The coming months are critical in our collective global response to climate change, and the implications for human health are immense. The Paris agreement enshrined the “right to health” as a core principle guiding action on climate change, for the first time formalizing health as a focus in the UNFCCC processes. The World Health Organization has made the “health impacts of climate and environmental change” one of its top priorities.
Though the challenge is great, policy responses to climate change present an unprecedented opportunity for public health, such as by reducing air pollution which is responsible for 7 million premature deaths annually. As impacts of climate change are increasingly felt, the movement of health professionals and health organizations addressing climate change around the world is growing.
The 2019 Global Climate and Health Summit alongside COP25 in Madrid will serve as a central moment for health civil society and other stakeholders to help drive global action to protect health from a changing climate.
The Summit will take place at the Complutense University in Madrid, and will be co-hosted by the Global Climate and Health Alliance in collaboration with the World Health Organization Regional Office for the Americas of the World Health Organization / Pan American Health Organization, the University of California-San Francisco, and the Harvard Global Health Institute.
The Summit aims to:
- Highlight this moment as both a critical turning point in global action on climate change and as an urgent global health issue.
- Increase awareness among delegates of the role health actors can play, to support increased national and global ambition to reduce emissions, and thus protect health.
- Facilitate the exchange of knowledge and best practice in protecting and promoting health in the face of climate change.
- Build and strengthen collaboration across health organizations and between sectors globally, seeking to increase capacity for a global response to climate change and its impacts on health.
- Provide an update on the Health commitments made at the UNSG Climate Action Summit 2019
Summit Programme
The summit programme can be downloaded on the right side of this webpage. Speakers include UN and government officials, mayors, health professionals, NGO's and youth members.
Registration and Participation
You can register here for the Climate Change and Health summit.
Registration is free of charge and open to anyone. An accreditation to COP25 is not necessary to attend this summit.
Related Links