Climate Change: Health

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Thursday 21st December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Walmsley on securing this very important debate. It has been a very good debate, ranging widely across the multifarious health impacts of climate change, both globally and domestically. My noble friend and many noble Lords across the House referred to the Lancet Countdown report, which is the basis for this debate. Its conclusions were supported and echoed around the Chamber, and are reinforced by the World Health Organization, among others.

My noble friend Lady Walmsley started with the conclusion of the Lancet Countdown report: climate change is not just hurting the planet, it is a public health emergency. She forcefully laid out the case made by the report and highlighted the critical issue globally: the delay in our response to climate change, which has jeopardised human life and livelihoods. She also reminded us that the tone of the latest report is optimistic and that over the past five years we have seen an accelerated response.

My noble friend Lord Teverson concentrated on housing as being key to public health. He pointed to the fuel poverty that results in 34,000 deaths per year; the devastating heat-related deaths that were experienced in Europe during the great heatwave a few years ago; and the unbelievable short-sightedness of the Government in doing away with the zero-carbon homes standard.

Obviously, we bow to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and his expertise in these areas. I would not like him to mark my work. His score of three puts the Government fairly and squarely in their place.

The right reverend Prelate is very exercised that we have become a world full of individuals thinking about ourselves and not thinking about everybody else. He wants us to understand that, as a community, we have to find a solution for all of us.

What can I say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury? He made a stunning maiden speech. He is clearly not an extinct species. He pointed us to some very good ways through life—evidence, logic and experience—and said that the precautionary principle should be used when we are not sure about our actions.

I have stood here several times in debates on climate change and talked about my experience of climate change during two years as a Minister in DfID with responsibility for Africa. I have talked about having felt desertification under my feet and seeing the disasters that result from too much water in Asia and too little water in Africa. Those extremes are increasing. I am very sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, is no longer in his place so that I am unable to educate him on the error of his ways.

As the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, pointed out, the World Health Organization has stated that between 2030 and 2050 climate change is expected to cause 250,000 extra deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress. To anyone who has spent time in the most challenging places in Africa, this is not a surprise of any kind. For the vast majority of those populations, already battling weak health infrastructure, the increasing levels of ill health will be insupportable. Those countries cannot improve their health systems fast enough to keep up with the pace of climate change.

When I was in Nigeria, I saw poverty, violence, conflict, disease and violence against women. They will all intensify with climate change. They already are. Lake Chad is a freshwater lake that provides water to more than 60 million people living in the four countries that border it, including Nigeria, and it is shrinking. The Nigerian part of the lake has diminished by 95%. It is called an ecological catastrophe by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The farmlands and villages surrounding what was the lake have desertified and died. That desertification led to the migration of the people who had lived there, causing conflict and pressure in the areas to which they migrated. There has been heat-related mortality, dehydration, the spread of infectious diseases, malnutrition, damage to public health infrastructure and the migration of both man and animals.

In Uganda, the glaciers at the tops of the Rwenzori mountains are receding at an unprecedented pace. The mean temperature has increased by 1.3 degrees. Trends in annual rainfall are significantly decreasing in the rainy season of March, April and May. Uganda is already experiencing health impacts: outbreaks of malaria, dengue fever, water-borne diseases, such as cholera and dysentery, diseases associated with floods, respiratory diseases and food insecurity.

Sierra Leone already had the highest rainfall in Africa. An average of 539 centimetres of rain falls on the capital, which is used to flooding, but it has a hugely dense population living in informal settlements—if you are being polite—in the slums of Freetown, which are an absolute horror. Large families are squeezed into tiny homes on river banks, the sides of mountains and the edge of the sea.

We heard from the noble Baroness about planting trees. Deforestation is destabilising the soil, as is the dumping of waste into drainages and the clearing of trees. There is a lack of political will. All these issues are challenges to dealing with climate change. In 2009, the Unjust Waters report found worsening floods in Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique and Kenya.

Kenya is so beautiful. It has an equatorial tropical climate which is hot and humid at the coast, temperate inland and very dry in the north and north-east. It has hot, dry lowlands and temperate highlands. It has two annual rainy seasons. It is prone to cyclical droughts and is expected to experience climate-driven events of increased intensity and frequency. There, climate change will increase malaria which will spread into new locations. There are already reports of increases in acute respiratory infections in the arid and semi-arid lands and the emergence and re-emergence of Rift Valley fever, Leishmaniasis and malnutrition. Adaptive capacity development is being targeted with the improved use of weather forecasting, which can provide the data needed to predict malaria epidemics, improved disease prediction capacity, early warning systems, improved epidemic preparedness and improved outbreak response.

In the Congo basin—noble Lords will be relieved to know that I am not going to take the House on a tour of every country in Africa that I visited, although I could go on and on. Health policy in these countries must ensure that all programmes incorporate climate change issues in their plans. It is a reality. They must adapt to minimise the consequences. As has been said, the greatest effects of climate change will devastate the poorest and most vulnerable in the world. The poor and the vulnerable are, as I have described, already suffering the effects of climate change. Adaptation and mitigation cannot keep pace. That is why our commitment—the world’s commitment—to signing up to the Paris agreement is vital. However, it is not just signing; that was not the point. Having a national plan that keeps us to 1.5 degrees is the point. My fear is that the signing may be the apex, the zenith, but we in this country, where our word is our bond, must act. Listening to noble Lords’ comments across the Chamber, I have to say that I have seen no change of pace since that awesome signing, no sense of urgency and no new measures that will deliver on the promise we have signed up to. That is unforgivable because we have been the cause. The countries that suffer most did not cause it; the poor of the world did not cause it.

We rich nations have a super-responsibility to the world, but also to ourselves. We are suffering health impacts too. Poor air quality, mentioned by my noble friend Lady Walmsley and the right reverend Prelate, is just one example. The main culprit for it is fossil fuel air pollution, which is not helped by the discovery that diesel is equally bad. We are not on course to meet our commitments in the fourth and fifth carbon budgets and, extraordinarily, the Government are still licensing more exploration for North Sea oil and gas and are encouraging—nay, reliant on—the shale gas industry filling the gap left by their lack of policy boldness. What are they thinking of, creating a new fossil fuel with one hand while signing the Paris agreement with the other? According to the Health and Environment Alliance, the health cost of fossil fuels in the UK every year is £23.2 billion. This Government must stop subsidising fossil fuel, as must Europe. Although as a Liberal Democrat I am obviously a Europhile, it is not perfect in this and has just made some decisions with which I disagree. It is a first.

It is absurd for Greg Clark to launch the Clean Growth Strategy and say we are leading the world in fighting climate change when the facts on the ground, such as the scrapping of the £1 billion competition, which has been mentioned, the measures in the Budget and fossil fuel subsidies scream the absolute opposite.

Again, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Walmsley on bringing this important topic to the Floor. The health impacts across the world and at home are overwhelming and faster and further action, not words, is the only hope we have.