Fossil fuel phaseout omitted from COP 28 health declaration

A total of 124 countries endorsed the first COP political declaration for climate and health. The declaration serves as an acknowledgment by countries of the health impacts of climate change. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said making the health argument can help people better understand the impact of climate change. “Of course the ice cap melting or the warming is very important and it’s happening, but it seems distant to many people. So I think this argument could help us, the health argument, because they can understand, ‘OK, our children are dying, or our citizens are dying, because of all these health conditions,’” he said on Sunday during the first climate and health ministerial meeting at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 28. The deadline to sign the document was Nov. 30. But some countries did so past the deadline, including China, which signed the document on Saturday. During the climate-health ministerial, Turkey also said it will adopt the declaration. It’s unclear yet if India, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, which depend on fossil fuels for their energy and their economy, will endorse it — even though fossil fuel phaseout wasn’t mentioned in the document, despite the harms it causes for health. “It's a really glaring omission that fossil fuels are not mentioned at all in the climate-health declaration,” Jess Beagley, policy lead at the Global Climate and Health Alliance, told Devex. Fossil fuel phaseout has been a contentious issue at COPs for years. “I think the thing that is disappointing is that there is already language on fossil fuels that is agreed by all UNFCCC [U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change] parties,” Beagley said, pointing to the language countries agreed to at COP 27 to accelerate efforts to phase down unabated coal and phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, although she said the ambition remains to phase out fossil fuels. Shweta Narayan, international climate and health campaigner for Health Care Without Harm, said they’re hoping India will join the list of countries that have endorsed the declaration, given the leadership it has shown during its Group of 20 major economies’ presidency to bring together the climate and health agenda. “I’m still optimistic that India will sign, because Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi’s comments in the leadership summit show that India is a climate leader, so I do not see why India would not be a climate and health leader,” she told Devex. India has a population of 1.4 billion people and is among the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Signing on to the declaration will show India’s commitment to protecting its population from its health impacts, she added. Instead of a fossil fuel phaseout, some are pushing for technological solutions at COP 28, such as carbon capture and storage. But Beagley said even if any of these technologies prove to be useful — there isn’t enough evidence yet that they do and they serve as a distraction from global decarbonization efforts, according to experts — they wouldn’t sufficiently address all the health impacts caused by the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. Countries are already struggling to deliver universal health coverage, with more than half experiencing worsening or no significant change in health service coverage since 2015, according to WHO and World Bank’s 2023 monitoring report on UHC. What more under a hotter planet? “Unless the health sector thinks outside the box, and unless climate and other decision makers think outside of the box, we could very rapidly have a problem on our hands that is harder than we can handle,” she said.