The human health burden of climate change: Non-economic losses and ethical considerations towards achieving planetary health

Abstract

Climate change presents an urgent and growing threat to the health and well-being of people and the planet. More frequent and intense heatwaves, droughts and floods are breaching critical ecosystem boundaries, causing cascading impacts that are increasingly complex to govern. Unsustainable development pathways and economic choices that are fueling the climate crisis are also directly engendering global health issues. Furthermore, the global response to climate change has been uneven and the lack of a conceptual framework for loss and damage has allowed developed countries the latitude to adopt differing takes on its framing, undermining the urgency and progression of the loss and damage mechanism to the detriment of developing countries. Current research on the governance of climate ethics posits that while economic and legal considerations largely influence climate policies, decision-making processes in climate adjacent sectors such as health need to be further grounded on ethically sound principles. Framing the health impacts of climate change as a moral issue can therefore be viewed as an effort to reshape the current political discourse with a humanistic lens and move the international community and state-level actors to action. The framing of this issue is particularly important as it recenters the focus on human health as an imperative for effective climate policies rather than as a contributor to the cache of peripheral co-benefits. It also underscores climate change as an ethical issue, in which failure to respond to the climate impacts can worsen health inequities, especially for socially and economically marginalized communities and vulnerable groups.