12/04/2021

(AU) Too Hot, Heading South: How Climate Change May Drive One-Third Of Doctors Out Of The NT

The Conversation -  | 

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Authors
  •  is Senior Staff Specialist, Alice Springs Hospital. Honorary, Australian National University
  • is Visiting researcher, Australian National University
A sizeable chunk of Northern Territory’s doctors are thinking about leaving the territory because of climate change, our new research shows.

Our study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health, shows for 34% of doctors in our survey, climate change is already, or is likely to, make them consider leaving the NT.

If they do, this would leave a large gap in the territory’s health-care system, which already suffers from a fast turnover of staff. These doctors would leave behind communities already suffering from the effects of climate change.

Extreme heat and getting worse

The two summers of 2018-20 were the hottest ever recorded in the NT.

From December 2019 to January 2020, temperatures were about 4℃ above the long-term average. And in late 2019, it was so hot, remote kidney dialysis centres struggled to cool water for their life-saving dialysis machines.

Summer 2018-2019 temperatures relative to every other summer since 1910. Data from AWAP (Jones et al 2009). Pandora Hope/BoM, Author provided

Some of the hottest conditions in 2019 were in the Katherine region, which shattered previous records. However, this shouldn’t have been a surprise.
In 2004 the CSIRO reported the average number of days over 40℃ in the Katherine region would increase by up to 35 days a year by 2030, due to climate change.

In 2019 there were 54 days of 40℃ or above in Katherine. This surpassed CSIRO’s predictions more than a decade earlier than projected.

Climate change is predicted to affect the NT in other ways. According to the territory government’s own report, the NT can expect warmer spells to last longer, more frequent fire weather, to have more intense/heavy rainfall, more intense tropical cyclones, and rising sea levels.

Norman Frank, Warumungu Senior Elder, on the impacts of climate change on Tennant Creek

NT has enough trouble retaining health workers anyway

Even without the effects of climate change, health workforce shortages in the NT have been significant challenges. The persistent challenges of attracting and retaining staff leads to high rates of churn. An entire clinic’s staff can turn over in just months, and the impacts can be shattering.

When Katherine’s only GP clinic closed last year, many people were forced to travel more than 300 kilometres to Darwin to see a family doctor.

For us doctors in the NT, knowing how hard it can be to recruit other doctors, summers like that of 2019-20 have raised the stakes. I’ve heard colleagues lament the impact of climate change and talk of moving south. Now we have the data to show how real this threat is.

We found out exactly the extent of the problem

We surveyed doctors working in the NT, with 362 responses, representing over 25% of the workforce.

Our study showed NT doctors believe climate change is a serious public health issue. A total of 85% indicated climate change is already or is likely to negatively impact their patients’ health; 74% believed climate change is already causing or likely to cause parts of the NT to become uninhabitable. And for 34%, climate change is already, or likely to, make them consider leaving the NT.

Extreme heat poses real risks, especially to the elderly and those with chronic conditions. Extreme heat is associated with increased rates of illness and death. Hot weather exacerbates existing heart, lung and kidney disease, and compounds mental illness.

For people living in the NT, the reality of this new and predictably worsening heat is tangible. Weekend sports are being affected, the period of relief in the cooler months is becoming shorter, and it’s uncomfortable simply going outside on very hot days. It is hard to contemplate living in a future NT hotter than it already is.

Why not move south?

One means of adapting to climate change is to move to cooler climates. But such migration is an option only for people with the means to move. People without such means will have no choice but to stay.

It is unlikely our findings about climate change affecting migration plans are confined to doctors, or to the NT. In Australia and globally, many regions are facing the dual burden of health workforce shortages and increasing exposure to climate risks.

In many of these regions, even small increases of out-migration could have significant impacts on health care.

It’s true most doctors in our survey did not think climate change would make them leave the NT, thought this unlikely, or were undecided. However, the 34% of our respondents who thought climate change might affect their plans represent 115 doctors, who we can’t afford to lose.

To address these issues, we need to urgently consider climate change when planning future health workforce needs. And we need to include health workers when Australia assesses the risk of climate change impacts.

These are vital if we are to ensure rural communities, in particular, have secure access to health care in the face of rapidly emerging climate threats.

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How Children Are Taking European States To Court Over The Climate Crisis – And Changing The Law

The Conversation - | |

Children join the 20th September 2019 climate strike in London, thought to be the largest climate strikes to date. World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
Authors
Even before Greta Thunberg launched her school strike for climate at age 15, youth activists have been key players in public action on the climate crisis. Now they’re breaking new ground in court.

On November 30, six Portuguese children and young people brought a historic court case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Dubbed Duarte Agostinho and Others v. Portugal and Others – or the Agostinho case, for short – it argues that those states which fail to solve the climate crisis are breaching human rights.

In an exciting development last December, the ECHR agreed to fast track the case. The 33 European states - including the UK (which, post-Brexit, remains part of the ECHR system), France and Germany - now have to respond with information about how they will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are destabilising the climate.

This case is part of a growing body of systemic climate litigation, which targets broad state policies. Much of it involves youth applicants for a number of reasons, including the fact that so many children and young people are climate-educated and tech-savvy. Unlike other cases, however, this particular application makes the key argument that states are engaging in youth discrimination.

Youth burden

The applicants to the ECHR – one of whom is as young as eight years old – have argued that, as well as violating their rights to life and to private life, governmental failure to tackle the climate crisis constitutes discrimination. They justify this claim by stating that “children and young adults are being made to bear the burden of climate change to a far greater extent than older generations.”

Portugal is reportedly a climate change hot spot, with increasingly deadly heatwaves. The young people involved in this case were witnesses to the 2017 fires in which over 120 people died.

They point out how it is children and young people in particular who are affected in the long term as well as the short term. The heat precipitated by the climate crisis can make everyday life – from studying to exercise – very difficult. It makes them fearful for their futures too.

The next step in the case is for states to explain that, where their actions disproportionately affect young people, this is due to objective factors and not to discrimination. They must also outline how they are considering children’s best interests in their policies.

Possibilities for youth?

Most international human rights treaties have a provision protecting groups from discrimination. Agostinho appears to be the first time such a provision is being used to protect “youth” as a category in an international/regional court. Age discrimination provisions are generally understood as protecting older people.

“Youth” is generally taken to include those up to their mid-twenties, but the definition is not clear cut. Under-18s require particular attention as they are generally excluded altogether from discrimination law. This is likely due to a mistaken interpretation of the law, based on the blanket assumption that children cannot have the same rights as adults.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child outlines the rights to which under-18s are entitled, and it has certainly been successful in drawing attention to the rights and interests of children.

But its non-discrimination article - which mirrors other human rights instruments - is also almost always applied to minorities, gender and disabled children. It is rarely used, if ever, to protect children (as opposed to adults) as a group from discrimination.

Unfair discrimination can include laws and practices that exclude groups. It can also include those that ignore the unique needs of a specific group. The latter is what is being argued in this case. The claimants’ position is that climate policies place most of the economic and environmental burden on the younger generation. Too little attention is being paid to figuring out how to share that burden and reduce carbon emissions right now.

This same argument has been used by petitioners in other ECHR cases - for example, where the Netherlands gave insufficient consideration to women’s rights in the context of pension policies. The argument has never been used at the ECHR for “youth” as a group, until now.

Youth discrimination

As experts on children’s rights and international law, our current research brings a legal element to a new discipline sometimes referred to as childism – like feminism, but for children.

This climate case is far from the only instance when youth have faced unfair discrimination. In some states (including the UK), there are dramatically lower minimum wages for under-18s (indeed under 25s) for the same work. It is also little known that in the UK children are more likely to be poor or to experience violence than adults.

At least one child per week dies in the UK at the hands of another person, and that figure is likely to be higher as there are difficulties with identifying the death of a young child as homicide. Yet as with many states, the Equality Act 2010 in the UK for the most part excludes under-18s from its protection.

Some social science and psychology academics have argued that bad attitudes to children are much of the cause of the hardships and rights violations they face. For example, beliefs that it is acceptable to hit children for punishment (still essentially legal in England for parents) are likely to be linked to relatively high homicide rates for children in the UK, as there is a clear link between excessive physical punishment and abuse.

By tackling discriminatory attitudes and policies, we can start to combat the actions that harm children. If the rights violations of under-18s were more frequently framed as equality issues (and litigated as such), it would mitigate the disadvantage under-18s as a group suffer due to disenfranchisement.

It would likely prompt states to give greater consideration to children in policy-making. It would also increase perceptions of children in the public consciousness as human beings equal in worth to adults.

Whether or not the ECHR finds that states are discriminating against youth in the Agostinho case, the arguments these children and young people have made are groundbreaking. It should start a conversation about how and whether equality law can benefit children as a group.

Law is far from the only means to achieve progress for children’s interests, but it can be a crucial part of explaining what treatment is and is not acceptable. The potential for developing understandings of youth discrimination in the anticipated judgment shows just how exciting this legal development at the ECHR is.

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Carbon Dioxide Levels Are At A 3.6 Million Year High

Salon - Matthew Rozsa

Despite the lockdown resulting in a slight reduction in emissions, Earth is now at a geological highpoint for CO2

Carbon Dioxide Emissions (Getty Images)

Because the COVID-19 pandemic caused a massive economic slowdown, experts had hoped that the decline in transportation and manufacturing might slow greenhouse gas emissions at least a little.

Unfortunately, a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reveals that one of the major gases behind climate change has reached its highest level in 3.6 million years.

The NOAA reports that the average amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was 412.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2020, an increase by 2.6 ppm through the course of the year.

Climate scientists generally agree that in order for life on Earth to be minimally interrupted, Earth's carbon dioxide levels should remain under 350 parts per million. Yet since NOAA begin recording atmospheric composition data in 1960, there has not been a year in which carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere did not increase.

Likewise, in 2020, overall carbon dioxide emissions increased at the fifth-highest rate in the 63 years that NOAA has been recording. It was only surpassed by the rates of increase in 1987, 1998, 2015 and 2016.

A senior scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, Pieter Tans, said that if there had not been an economic slowdown, it would have been the highest increase on record.

As things current stand, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at a point comparable to the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period, when the temperature was 7 degrees hotter and the sea level was roughly 78 feet higher than today.

Another organization, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, released similar results on Wednesday, announcing that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 417.4 ppm at their monitoring station in Hawaii .

These graphs depict the mean global atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide as analyzed from measurements collected by NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. Credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory.

The NOAA also reported a "significant jump" in the atmospheric burden of methane in 2020, with the annual amount increasing by 14.7 parts per billion (ppb) in 2020. Not only is this the biggest jump since methane levels began to be systematically measured in 1983, but it is also troubling because of how effective methane is at trapping heat.

Although there is much less methane than carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, it is 28 times more potent at trapping heat over the course of a century.

Still, the COVID-19 lockdowns had a minor effect on emissions.

"The estimates vary among the different groups doing these sorts of calculations, but the consensus seems to be about a 7% decrease [in greenhouse gas emissions] relative to 2019 levels," Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, wrote to Salon in December.

If climate change is not halted and/or reversed in the near future, experts agree that there will be serious and negative repercussions for all life on Earth, including humans.

There will be an increase in extreme weather events like hurricanes and blizzards, an increase in the amount of wildfires and a reduction in the amount of land that can be used to produce food.

All of this will lead to fierce competition for resources and mass population displacements, even as an increasing amount of the world's surface either too hot or too dry to be inhabitable.

President Joe Biden has said that he will prioritize fighting climate change in his presidency. Shortly after taking office, he said in a statement that "environmental justice will be at the center of all we do."

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