On World Health Day WHO Wants to Protect Human Health and Combat Climate Crisis

The World Health Organization (WHO) was created on April 7, 1948 in order to facilitate and coordinate health affairs within the United Nations. April 7th is also known as World Health Day.

This year, the organization believes that leaders and all people need to preserve and protect the health of others, while also mitigating the climate crisis. This call to action is a part of their “Our planet, our health” campaign.

“The climate crisis is a health crisis: the same unsustainable choices that are killing our planet are killing people,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement. “We need transformative solutions to wean the world off its addiction to fossil fuels, to reimagine economies and societies focused on well-being, and to safeguard the health of the planet on which human health depends.”

WHO notes that 99 percent of people breathe unhealthy air, and this is mostly caused by the burning of fossil fuels. According to WHO, mosquitos are spreading diseases further and faster than ever before due. 

"Extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, land degradation and water scarcity are displacing people and affecting their health," the organization shared in a statement. "Pollution and plastics are found at the bottom of our deepest oceans, the highest mountains, and have made their way into our food chain and blood stream. Systems that produce highly processed, unhealthy foods and beverages are driving a wave of obesity, increasing cancer and heart disease while generating up to one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. This health and social crisis is compromising people’s ability to take control over their health and lives."

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fault lines of inequity across the world, underlining the urgency for creating sustainable, well-being societies which do not breach ecological limits and which ensure that all people have access to life-saving and life-enhancing tools, systems, policies and environments.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the urgency for creating sustainability, WHO wants to make sure that all governments are able to create a healthy and green recovery from COVID-19 while preserving nature- which they feel is the source of human health.

For the World Health Day campaign, WHO is urging all governments, organizations, corporations, and citizens to share actions they are taking to protect the earth and human health.