Weird how it’s always either money or power. Or both
The Climate-Health Crisis Needs Money, Not More Declarations
On the day France recorded its hottest temperature on record, a coalition of health ministers, officials and advocates huddled in a sweaty, half-full auditorium in Paris to take stock of a campaign they have spent a decade waging: the fight to put human health at the centre of the world’s response to climate change.
The meeting was a high-level gathering of the Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health (ATACH), the WHO-hosted network of 106 countries launched at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021.
Convened under France’s G7 presidency, the summit’s task was to look ahead to COP31 in Antalya in Türkiye in November, to gauge what fights the health community should place at the top of its agenda. (snip)
While part of the meeting carried the air of a victory lap, it was also a reckoning with the one thing recognition has not delivered: money.
“Finance is the weakest one, and I think this is a key point for this meeting,” said Elena Villalobos Prats, the WHO official who built much of ATACH’s architecture.
Have they considered holding fundraisers? Selling candy bars or something? Raffle tickets? Why is it always the taxpayers who have to pay for this cult scam?
WHO now ranks climate change as the first of six priorities in its current programme of work, and its officials insist the economics are settled too. “At an absolute minimum, every dollar that you invest gets you $4 back,” Campbell-Lendrum said.
Yeah, that’s a scam
The French Development Agency puts the cost of adapting the world’s health systems to climate change at $22 billion. The UN climate body’s estimate runs higher, at $26.8 billion to $29.4 billion a year by 2050.
At COP29, wealthy nations agreed to provide $300 billion a year by 2035, against the $1.3 trillion the developing world said it needed. Health receives a fraction of a fraction of that, capturing roughly 2% of adaptation funding and 0.5% of multilateral climate finance, a share that has not moved since Glasgow.
The collapse of aid budgets, led by the United States, has tightened the squeeze. “The world just feels a little bit meaner,” Watts said. “We’re entering into a bit of a rough patch. It’s going to last for a couple of years, and everyone knows what it feels like in their own national context.”
Wild how all these nations say they want to Do Something but mostly depend on the US paying for it.
On the day France recorded its hottest temperature on record….
If only someone had warned them twenty years ago that this might happen. They could have prepared and averted this. It seems not even the people who were saying this all along took themselves seriously. Instead they opportunistically put all their eggs in the wealth transfer basket. The only people who took it seriously were high school children and attention-seeking adults.