Highland health professionals join Inverness climate emergency protest
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HEALTH professionals, families, and people from across the Highlands gathered in Falcon Square last Saturday to mark the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Egypt and to highlight the many connections between the climate emergency and human health.
Last year COP26 was in Glasgow and a large group of doctors and others from the Highlands joined 100,000 people marching outside to demand meaningful action to tackle the crisis.
Dr Kay Kelly, Inverness, representing Highland Health Care for Climate Action, said: "We were disappointed. Whilst we were on the streets outside, representatives of fossil fuel companies were invited into the talks, to hamper and delay collective action.
"This year the COP27 conference centre was again flooded with fossil fuel lobbyists. Coca Cola, the world’s biggest producer of plastic pollutants, was a major sponsor."
Dr Kelly pointed out that the World Health Organisation estimates that between 2030 and 2050, climate change will cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.
"Unicef estimates that one billion children are at extremely high risk of impacts from the climate crisis," she said.
"An additional seven million people die each year from air pollution, a health threat closely connected with the climate crisis and caused predominantly by fossil fuel burning.
"Our time spent in Falcon Square has taught us how passers-by respond to the crisis. Many avert their eyes, admitting that they are fearful of what the future will hold. Some can imagine only a dystopian world of perpetual wars and privately-owned cities as our civilisation is dismantled by profit-greedy corporations.
"Some cling to a belief that someone, the government, or even God himself, will intervene and rescue Creation.
"The next five years is our government’s last chance to make the right decisions to support a liveable climate hand-in-hand with a more just economy.
"Our children’s generation will not be given that chance."
