Over 100 doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers from across BC
will gather in Victoria on November 4th and march on the BC Legislature, calling on the
government to act in the face of the growing ecological threat to health. Organized by
Doctors for Planetary Health—West Coast, the marchers will demand that the provincial
government declare a climate and ecological emergency and act on a range of issues that
contribute to these dual crises. This event will be the first doctor and nurse
climate rally of its kind in Canada.
An unprecedented
editorial published in September in more than 200 leading medical journals reported “that
‘the greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to
keep the amount of global temperature rise below 1.5°C and to restore
nature’”.
The health consequences of climate change are already being felt in BC.
“I saw so many elderly and young people with respiratory and heat-related illness due to the
heat dome and wildfires”, said Dr Kyle Merritt, an ER physician in the Interior of BC, “it
was the first time I wrote climate change in the chart.”The editorial emphasized that the
health impacts of these ecological crises will affect people who are vulnerable, and
low-income communities and countries the most. Therefore, it is important, the organizers
emphasized, that any action on these ecological crises be undertaken in conjunction with
BC’s First Nations and Indigenous people, with a particular focus on addressing social and
ecological injustice in BC and around the world, and with due consideration for the rights
of future generations to a healthy and sustainable environment.
The doctors take
their cue in part from UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who in August described the
latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a “Code Red for
humanity”. But, said the march organizers, we have a BC government that is dragging its
heels on the climate emergency.
In a background document, they note that BC is
still pushing for new fossil fuel extraction and export and is still providing tax breaks
and other forms of support to the fossil fuel industry but has yet to declare a climate
emergency. The group calls on the BC government to address these deficiencies, set legally
binding emissions targets based on evolving climate science, invest in a regenerative zero
emissions economy and ensure a Just Transition for affected workers and communities.
But the organizers emphasize that this is not just about action on the climate
emergency, important as that is. As the UN Environment Program (UNEP) recognized in
February, the world faces at the same time a crisis of biodiversity loss, a crisis of
pollution, and other human-driven ecological crises. For the sake of humanity, doctors are
asking for governments to do as the UNEP says, and make peace with nature.
Thus
Doctors for Planetary Health - West Coast call on the BC government to return to its
commitment to bring in a Species at Risk Act, recognize the rights of nature, bring in an
alternative to GDP that truly reflects social and ecological wellbeing and progress, create
a Commissioner for Future Generations, and bring in a Wellbeing budget and a Wellbeing of
Future Generations Act, all measures that have been enacted in similar-sized jurisdictions
such as Wales and Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Doctors for Planetary Health - West
Coast is a grassroots collective of physicians and nurses from across BC who are working to
create an interdisciplinary health movement to address the climate and other ecological
crises.
