Dear IFMSA enthusiasts!
Today is our fourth day at the Conference of the Parties (COP) and you might wonder, what we actually do here on a daily basis? Well, we do our best to tell every living being here at the event that climate change has extensive effects on our health and that we need to act soon, because otherwise a massive amount of people will suffer (more) and die due to direct or indirect impacts.
Fortunately the World Health Organization (WHO) has released some cool publications both for climate health newbies and experienced people. You can find a selection of nice publications at the official WHO website (http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/climate_change/facts/en/index.html)
Especially this one provides a very good summary of the whole topic and we use it usually to introduce people to the topics: “Protecting health from climate change: Connecting science, policy and people”(http://www.who.int/globalchange/publications/reports/9789241598880/en/index.html)
And if you can only spend five minutes on reading, then check out these 10 facts on climate change and its impacts on health:
Then we work actively on policy design and negotiations by drafting submissions and proposals for specific areas of climate change. We aim to bring thereby the health aspect into policies or statements that will be released to the public. To be able to submit texts or to convince the negotiators, lobbying plays quite a big role. This means that we’re hunting for delegates at the weirdest places, arrange face-to-face meetings with them and explain them why they should care about health or more specifically about the co-benefits of climate change mitigation.
Last but not least we try to inform you guys as good as possible about what’s going on here. Since we have to allocate our time and energy to a lot of things, we have to select what information might be relevant for you. But at the same time, we would like to encourage you to tell us, what YOU are interested in and what we should write about! Do you like daily reports? Are you more interested in how the negotiations go on? Or do you want us to find useful materials that you can use to run your own climate health campaign or project at home?
You can get in touch with us using the following channels:
– Comment here on our blog! Please don’t be afraid of posting anything that interests you, since a blog is meant to be interactive! 🙂
(also check out the blog of “Healthy Planet”! (http://healthyplanetuk.wordpress.com/)
– Follow us on Twitter, retweet or comment our posts to spread the message:
– Like our Facebook page and follow our updates
So if you have thoughts, feel free to share them! 🙂
Greets from Durban,
Sebastian
on behalf of the COP17 delegation
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