English Transcript

Cập nhật 02/07/2008 17:28:00

The UN World Health Day this year took climate change as its main theme, and the issue also dominated the recent World Health Assembly. The Assembly sets the research agenda for the World Health Organisation, which now has a packed year ahead studying the impact of climate change on health, and helping poorer countries cope with it all.

PODGER: Marking this year's World Health Day, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said climate change is sometimes talked about as if it only affects the planet, not the people living on it. The WHO spokesman for the Western Pacific Region, Peter Cordingley, says that's got to change:

CORDINGLEY: Climate change, we're absolutely certain about, it's happening and it's going to get worse. And the issues that we're looking at on the health front at WHO are to do with the flooding of low lands and those seawaters will first of all cause displacement of populations. We're looking at arable lands becoming dry and unusable, and then we're looking at crop failures, starvation, hunger, poverty.

PODGER: The years it's taken the international community to accept climate change means there's a lot of catching up to do on the research front. Dr Cordingley says it'll be a busy time ahead for climate and health researchers:

CORDINGLEY: With the kind of research we hope to provide them, we think they should do one specific thing - and that's to make climate change at the centre of their health policies, to create systems that will help protect the public against climate change.

PODGER: Dr Cordingley says health policy will need to be dovetailed into other areas, such as agriculture and town planning. In our region, he says researchers will also need to keep track of disease-carrying insects into cooler areas.

CORDINGLEY: We're looking also at the effects of climate change - global warming in this case - on mosquitoes. We're already seeing mosquitoes in places that they've never been seen before, like in South Korea and the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and wherever mosquitoes go, they're going to take malaria with them - and this will be in populations that have no resistance to malaria.

PODGER: Ivo Mueller is a German researcher at Papua New Guinea's Institute of Medical Research.

MUELLER: We've surveyed outbreaks here where we've went into villages where 60 percent of the people had malaria, and in that particular village the villagers decided to abandon the village after the epidemic was over and they moved the whole village 200 or 300 metres up the mountain - so they basically abandoned their houses and rebuilt the entire village further up the hill. And in the new malaria control plan that's just now being discussed in PNG, there will be again a focus on trying to control outbreaks in the Highlands.

PODGER: Charles Delacollette is with the WHO's Mekong Malaria Program in the Thai capital Bangkok. He says because Thailand's long been warm enough for malaria mosquitoes, the government's had an effective control policy in place for decades. Dr Delacollette says this could serve as a model for other nations. It includes spraying, insecticidal bednets - and extremely close surveillance.

DELACOLLETTE: For example at the community level they established community malaria posts, in which you have malaria workers working at community level and able to provide treatment and preventive measures to village people. And then at provincial level, district level, community level, it was a chain of command in which you have like military operations. The standard operating procedures were very well defined, the staff were paid, were supervised with regular monthly reporting, so the system was quite well managed.

PODGER: Many communities can feel disempowered by climate change. But new grassroots groups are emerging to change that - aiming to cut the carbon emissions causing climate change. In May, New Delhi hosted the country's first Youth Climate Summit.

PODGER: Summit organiser Kartikeya Singh says the participants want the Indian capital to take the lead and become the most eco-friendly:

SINGH: Delhi has the highest per capita consumption of resources in terms of water, energy, you name it, we're adding 1000 vehicles a day to the streets of Delhi. So we decided to take these different challenges such as energy and transport, water, waste and urban planning in the context of climate change, because Delhi is attempting to become what we would call a world class city.

PODGER: Another grassroots initiative to cutting carbon emissions is a Transition Town. These are towns looking to reduce their reliance on oil. In Sunshine Coast in north-east Australia, organiser Sonya Wallace says lots of residents are buying food that hasn't been trucked or flown hundreds or thousands of kilometres.

WALLACE: Whether there's a community supported agriculture scheme in our local area, or if there's farmers' markets or food box systems or some sort of organic food cooperative that we can support financially and also be getting our food very, very close to home.