Australia needs policy to deal with health effects of climate change, says Chris Bowen

Australia needs to develop policies and structures to prepare for the health impacts of climate change because we have not moved quickly enough – domestically or internationally – to reduce emissions and mitigate the risk, Labor’s health spokesman, Chris Bowen, believes.

Bowen will use a lecture at Sydney University on Wednesday night to argue a health response to climate change would not be necessary if there was a robust international policy response to emissions. “But the world, and Australia, has failed to act with appropriate seriousness and haste, and so we will need specific policies to deal with the health impacts of climate change,” he will say.

A copy of the lecture shows Bowen will point to estimates that by 2030, 250,000 people around the world will die each year as a direct result of a warming planet.

But what was often missing from the public debate in Australia “is an understanding that severe climate change, of the type the globe is currently on track to experience, isn’t just about the frequency and severity of weather events”.

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“It is about changing climate zones, desertification, ocean acidification, ecosystem collapse; these impacts threaten our food supply, our economy, our security and of course our health,” it says.

“As some have put it, climate change is so dangerous to health that it threatens to unwind 50 years of progress in improving public health outcomes, as well as adaptation to already unavoidable impacts from climate change.”

Bowen will argue that climate change means more prevalent natural disasters and heatwaves in a country already prone to both, and the arrival of disease: “Countries not so far to our north are prone to vector-borne diseases. It would not take too much more of an increase in temperature for us to be prone to those diseases.”

He will challenge the Morrison government to add climate change to the list of national health priorities. There are nine priority areas agreed between the commonwealth and the states – cancer control, cardiovascular health, injury prevention, mental health, diabetes mellitus, arthritis and musculoskeletal conditions, obesity and dementia – and the health minister, Greg Hunt, has proposed a 10th: medicines safety.

Bowen will say adding climate change “would raise awareness of the importance of the challenge of climate change health and set out a road map for dealing with it”.

The United States, a climate laggard under the Trump administration, has a significant program of climate change, disease control and prevention research, and Britain also has a sustainable development strategy: “But in Australia we have no such equivalent.

“This is despite the fact we are more exposed than most, and our medical community is increasingly vocal on the issue, from Doctors for the Environment, to the Australian Medical Association, which recently declared climate change to be a health emergency.”

Guardian Australia revealed in September that the AMA had formally declared climate change a health emergency, pointing to “clear scientific evidence indicating severe impacts for our patients and communities now and into the future”.

Related: Australian Medical Association declares climate change a health emergency

The landmark shift, delivered by a motion of its federal council, brought the organisation into line with forward-leaning positions taken by the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association and Doctors for the Environment Australia.

The American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians recognised climate change as a health emergency in June 2019, and the following month the British Medical Association declared a climate emergency and committed to campaign for carbon neutrality by 2030.

The World Health Organisation has recognised since 2015 that climate change was the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century, and argued the scientific evidence for that assessment was “overwhelming”.

The AMA president, Tony Bartone, said climate change meant higher mortality and morbidity from heat stress, injuries and mortalities from severe weather, increases in the transmission of vector-borne diseases, food insecurity resulting from declines in agricultural outputs, and higher incidences of mental ill health.

Bowen will say he has been struck in his first six months in the health portfolio by the number of clinicians and medicos who have engaged him on climate change.

“As one senior doctor put it me powerfully recently: ‘Doctors listen to the science of the climate change and its health impacts like we listen to the science of vaccination and the impacts of not vaccinating. They are as clear as each other, and ignoring the science of climate change would be akin to supporting anti-vaxxers.’ ”