Doctors for the Environment Australia released the statement below on May 2.
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Doctors and medical students are calling climate change a “public health emergency” and will join hundreds of Australians for the National Day of Divestment, organised by 350.org and Market Forces, on May 3.
Across Australia, doctors and medical students will deliver letters to their banks calling on them to divest from fossil fuels, while others will close their accounts.
Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) is extremely concerned about the growing health impacts from climate change and is advocating fossil fuel divestment as a health measure.
Grace Davies, national medical student representative for DEA, said today: “Climate change is a public health emergency and fossil fuels are a major cause. Fossil fuel use and climate change threaten our most fundamental health rights of clean air, water and food security and a tolerable climate.
“One of the most effective ways to honour our duty of care to humanity is to divest from fossil fuels.
“Since 2008, the big four banks have loaned $19 billion to coal and gas projects in Australia, and as much as 55% of our superannuation is invested in high carbon sectors globally. By contrast only 2% of our superannuation is invested in renewable energy.
“It is clear that the fossil fuel industry can only be slowed by removing financial support and the social licence to operate. That’s why we are taking part in the National Day of Divestment.”
DEA has welcomed an editorial in the British Medical Journal calling on the medical profession to step up its response to climate change and advocate for divestment from fossil fuels.
Dr Helen Redmond from DEA said: “Premier medical journal the Lancet said in 2009 that climate change is the greatest health threat of the 21st century.
“The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has reinforced like never before the urgency with which humanity must start drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
“Even the 0.8C temperature rise we are already experiencing has resulted in significant harm to health from heat-related illness, more frequent and severe bushfires, extreme weather events, food and water scarcity, increased infectious and food borne illnesses and coastal inundation.
“Further warming will see much more severe impacts, especially on the most vulnerable in society.
“The heatwaves and bushfires that swept across Australia last summer remind us that the problems associated with climate change are already affecting our health and wellbeing and that further procrastination will only result in greater health impacts, especially in those who are least able to protect themselves from the changes.
“It is now widely agreed that we must leave 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground to give us a chance of staying within 2C of warming. At current rates of extraction we are on track for a 4C rise in global temperature this century — a level incompatible with human civilisation as we know it.
“As doctors, we have a duty of care to our patients, and we have a duty of care to humanity in this enormous threat to global public health.
“As the editorial in the BMJ says: ‘Those who profess to care for the health of people perhaps have the greatest responsibility to act.’”