Canadian Medical Association completes divestment from fossil fuels
From nationalobserver.com
The Canadian Medical Association’s General Council, held last week in Vancouver, may well be remembered as the moment that Canadian MDs made climate change — dubbed “the biggest health threat of the 21st century” by the World Health Organization — a priority.
First, the diagnosis of climate change as a health emergency was laid out in detail by one of Canada’s most well-respected doctors, Dr. James Orbinski, who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) in 1999. The Canadian Medical Association then confirmed it had in fact completed the divestment of its organizational funds from fossil fuels.
The meeting kicked off with a keynote address by Dr. Orbinski, one of Canada’s most noted humanitarians. “There is no question that climate change is the biggest health threat of our time,” he said, adding that "we cannot possibly live, we cannot possibly survive, we cannot possibly thrive” without a functioning biosphere. He spoke of the disproportionate impacts on Canada’s North, where temperature increases are already in the range of three degrees Celsius, and about the risks of extreme weather, wildfires, flooding and changing patterns of infectious disease.
One of the most passionate moments of Dr. Orbinski’s speech came when he was discussing the malnutrition and food-security risks of climate change.
“In 2011, climate-change driven drought affected 13 million people and 500,000 people died, in the Horn of Africa. This is utterly unacceptable," he said. "That we simply know this and we allow it to continue. It requires that we see ourselves differently in relation to others in the world. This is the consequence of climate change. It is profound and it is utterly unacceptable.“
Dr. Orbinski’s experience providing care in conflict zones including Rwanda, Afghanistan and Somalia lent special weight to his comments on the relationship between scarce resources and conflict. "When you cannot feed your children you will do anything," he said. "Even if it means going to war.” Dr. Orbinski cited literature from both Darfur and Syria showing that drought was a factor in conflicts that arose in those countries. In those conflicts, “climate change was a catalyst with a cascading effect on stability," he said.
These effects are not merely local to the conflict. As Dr. Orbinski said, “the European project is being destabilized by refugee flows.”
Read more here