While we think of carbon emissions coming from manufacturing and agriculture, we don’t often think of those arising from health care. In Australia, health care is responsible for 7% of national carbon emissions, while globally, health care is responsible for 4.4% of emissions.If global health care was a country, it would be the world’s fifth largest emitter. The warming resulting from health-care’s emissions in turn cause harm to human health through heatwaves, wildfires, increased mosquito-borne infectious diseases, and undernutrition due to drought and lower fish stock.In short, treating patients indirectly causes human harm, at odds with the mission of health-care professionals to increase the duration and quality of patients’ lives.Read more: Five ways...
Climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, social upheaval, and political chaos are all manifestations of a singular crisis—a global polycrisis. The evidence is all...
According to research published in Nature, man-made structures have hardened 33 per cent of the world’s sandy beaches. These beaches have hardened significantly due to the construction of impermeable surfaces like roads, seawalls, and urban infrastructure. Coastal hardening, which prevents shorelines from migrating and retreating naturally, is a growing concern. With 84% of its coastline hardened, the Bay of Bengal is in first place, followed by Western and Central Europe (68%) and the Mediterranean (65%). The necessity to safeguard the constantly expanding coastal communities against erosion and floods, a tendency that has accelerated since the 1950s, is the driving force behind this broad coastal hardening. High-income areas, including California and the Atlantic coast of the United States, have made...