The Lancet medical journal: Cutting greenhouse gas emissions has major direct health benefits

From Climate Progress:

“Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” So concluded a Lancet—UCL Commission earlier this year.  A systematic appraisal of available evidence showed that the risks from changing patterns of disease, food insecurity, unsafe water and sanitation, damage to human settlements, extreme events, and population growth and migration were far more severe for human health than most observers had understood. The message added an important new dimension to the political debate about how to respond to climate change. The threat was not only environmental and economic; it was directed at life itself.

So begins “The climate dividend,” a commentary on six new studies appearing in the Lancet medical journal (here).  I had blogged on the earlier commission report here.  Green Car Congress has a good story on the studies, noting that “a potential 150-million-stove program in India from 2010-2020 gives the largest co-benefit of any examined in the six papers.”  By “providing low-emission stove technologies in poor countries that currently rely on solid fuel household stoves to cook and heat their homes,” the “10-year program could prevent 2 million premature deaths in India” while reducing greenhouse pollution by hundreds of millions of tons. …

The Lancet medical journal: Cutting greenhouse gas emissions has major direct health benefits

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