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220 Medical Journal Editors Urge Immediate Action on Climate Change

A joint editorial from leading international medical and public health journals warned of the toll that extreme weather events are already taking on mental and physical health.

In an unprecedented joint statement, the editors of 220 leading medical and public health journals signed and published an editorial on Sunday calling for more ambitious global efforts to address climate change. Painting a dire portrait of more extreme heat waves, fiercer storms, and rapidly rising seas, the editorial frames climate change as a public health crisis, discussing its impact on humanity’s mental and physical well-being, particularly for children, elderly people, disabled people, and ethnic minorities. The editorial warns that rising temperatures “risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.” It asks for “fundamental changes” to limit global temperature increases and urges wealthier countries to go beyond $100 billion a year in preparing low-income countries to adapt to the warming of the globe. Spearheaded by the U.K. Health Alliance on Climate Change, a coalition of 21 health organizations, the editorial was published in journals across the U.K., the U.S., China, Africa, South America, India, and Australia. It is aimed at world leaders, who will be gathering with the U.N. in mid-September and at a global climate treaty conference in November. “Health professionals have been on the front-line of the COVID-19 crisis,” the editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal said. “And they are united in warning that going above 1.5 C and allowing the continued destruction of nature will bring the next, far deadlier crisis.”