Primary Health Care Responses to Climate Change
Grant Andrew Blashki, Helen Louise Berry and Michael Richard Kidd In 2008, two anniversaries coincided and highlighted two major global public health challenges for this century the 60th World Health Day, focused on 'protecting health from climate change', and the 30th anniversary of the Alma Ata declaration, which emphasised the importance of primary health care.1 Climate change is a serious global public health problem that, amongst other things, threatens attainment of the United Nations...
Climate Justice Vulnerability and Adaptation
This chapter is primarily concerned with climate change as an issue of distributive justice. The interplay of the causes of climate change on the one hand, and the determinants of vulnerability to that change on the other, raises issues of distributive justice.1 For example, it is well understood that because emissions of greenhouse gases are closely correlated to income, it is typically the case that the wealthiest groups are responsible for the bulk of past and present emissions, implying in...
Contents
Foreword Climate Change as an Equity Issue Part I Science, Fairness and Responsibility 1. The Blame Game Assigning Responsibility for the Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change 2. Climate Change as an Ethical Issue 4. Climate Change and Intergenerational Equity 5. Some Distributional Issues in Greenhouse Gas Policy Design John Freebairn 82 Part II Climate Change and Vulnerable Groups 7. Justice and Adaptation to Climate Change 8. Primary Health Care Responses to Climate Change Grant Andrew...
Peter Singer
For most of human existence, people living only short distances apart might as well have been living in separate worlds. A river, a mountain range, a stretch of forest or desert these were enough to cut people off from each other. As a result, human beings developed systems of ethics to deal with problems within our community, rather than with the impact of our actions on those far away. Responsibilities and harms were generally clear and well defined. We took the atmosphere and the oceans for...
Securing Equitable Outcomes through Policy
In the previous section, it's argued that the danger that human and ecological systems face with respect to climate change is not so much tied up in the climate system itself, but in other social and economic processes that contribute to vulnerability, not the least of which is human aspirations for wealth and the security of livelihoods. This suggests that the criteria we select for evaluating possible climate policies should reflect such processes. In the book Climate Code Red,19 a number of...
A Competitive Partial Equilibrium Model
Consider by way of illustration the example of fossil fuel fired electricity or transport. Under BAU, producers consider the private costs of fuel and other materials, labour and capital, but not the external costs of pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions. Consumers consider the market price of electricity or transport costs, but again not the external costs of pollution. But the flow of greenhouse gases from each and every country adds to the global stock of these gases. In time, a...
Ross Garnaut
I congratulate the Social Justice Initiative for creating this collection which will help fill out what has been an underdeveloped area of Australian thinking about the climate change issue. I took about the same interest in climate change as the average literate citizen until mid-2007 when the Premiers and the then Leader of the Opposition asked me to conduct a review of the impact of climate change on Australia and of policies for Australia. Some of the old wisdom of economic policy analysis...
Responding to the Carbon Debt
Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse gas GHG emission rates on the planet, at about twenty seven tonnes per person carbon dioxide-equivalent per annum this is even higher than emissions per person in the United States roughly twenty four tonnes and more than double the per capita average for industrialised countries. Our energy intensive economy and lifestyle is typical of the developed world, which is responsible for over 80 per cent of all GHG emissions being produced at present....
Carbon Trading The Moral Objections
While most environmentalists are now resigned to carbon trading schemes and many are enthusiastic supporters it was not so long ago that some regarded such schemes with deep suspicion.5 The standard defence of cap-and-trade schemes over carbon taxes is that they enable progressive reductions over time in the total quantity of carbon emissions in a given jurisdiction which cannot be guaranteed by a tax while also conferring flexibility on the part of emitters to find their own least-cost...
Climate Change and Intergenerational Equity
Human activity over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries has led to a steady increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, from a preindustrial concentration of 280 parts per million ppm to a current concentration of 380 ppm. This change in the atmosphere has generated changes to the earth's climate that are already evident and will continue for decades, and perhaps centuries into the future. Processes taking place over periods of a century or...
Bibliography 1
Allen, Myles R. and Richard Lord, 'The Blame Game Who Will Pay for the Damaging Consequences of Climate Change ', Nature, vol. 452, 2004, pp. 551-2. Barnett, Tim P, David W. Pierce, G. Hidalgo Hugo, Celine Bonfils, Benjamin D. Santer, Tapash Das, Govindasamy Bala, Andrew W Wood, Toru Nozawa, Arthur A. Mirin, Daniel R. Cayan and Michael D. Dettinger, 'Human-induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States', Science, vol. 319, 2008, pp. 1080-3. Enting, I. G. and R. M. Law,...
Conclusion Puz
The example from Niue offered here broadly confirms three insights emerging from recent research on adaptation. 23 First, adaptation to climate change will occur, but unless there are policies to prevent it, the result may be increased poverty and inequality. Second, adaptation policies to maintain the public good of equity need to be informed by very careful diagnosis of who is vulnerable, the drivers of this vulnerability, and the mechanisms to resolve it, lest such policies do nothing to...
Series Editor Dr Jeremy Moss
The Social Justice SJS , issued by MUP in collaboration with Melbourne University's Social Justice Initiative, aims to contribute to public and scholarly debate by providing critical insights into contemporary issues concerning social justice. The series also aims to highlight the value of interdisciplinary approaches to problems of social justice. I MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited 187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia Text...
Health Impacts of Climate Change
Against this background, in 2008 the World Health Organization WHO chose the theme 'protecting health from climate change' for World Health Day.11 This involved public talks, media releases and national policy reports launched around the world by a variety of organisations. Dr Margaret Chan, Director of the WHO, stated that Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Climate change will affect, in profoundly adverse ways, some of the most fundamental determinants of health...
International Carbon Trading
The fairness of any carbon trading system depends, in part, on the fairness of the initial allocation of allowances. To the extent that Annex I countries seek to reach their Kyoto targets solely or primarily through a national trading system, linked with the Kyoto flexibility mechanisms, then the question of the justice of the initial target allocation arises.22 While the UNFCCC's burden sharing principles of equity and CBDR underpinned the bifurcated architecture of the Kyoto Protocol which...
The Political Economy of Vulnerability and Adaptation in Niue
Niue is small island in the South Pacific located 480 kilometres east of Tonga, about a four hour flight from Auckland. The island has a land area of 259 square kilometres. It may be the only country in the world that is a net sink of greenhouse gases because forest regrowth appears to be sequestering more carbon than is being emitted from human activities.11 As a result of climate change, air temperature in Niue is expected to increase by between 0.7 to 1.5 degrees C by the year 2050.12 Only...
Bibliography Mhx
Baer, P., T. Athanasiou and S. Kartha, The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework, Heinrich Boll Foundation, Berlin, 2007. Department For International Development DFID , 'Adaptation to Climate Change Making Development Disaster-Proof', Key Sheet 06, DFID, London, 2004. Friedman, L., 'Adaptation World Bank Releases New Adaptation Plan', Climate Wire, 7 April 2008, www.eenews.net Fry, I., 'An International Blueprint on Adaptation', paper...