A hotter Earth will affect how we eat, how we live, what makes us sick and how we heal. But is South Africa ready?
“Disadvantaged communities are most vulnerable”, the health department admits in the country’s first climate change plan for health released in 2014. “And yet [these communities] have the least resources, to respond to climate change and health threats, such as increased natural disasters, food and water insecurity and changing disease distribution.”
These are shifts that threaten a health system already struggling to cope with a high burden of disease and severe socioeconomic inequality.committed the government to, among other things, creating a national climate change steering committee, charting potential health impacts and piloting new ways of adapting to changing temperatures in communities.The document’s toted provincial implementation strategies, for instance, are not publicly accessible.
Overall, the previous strategy dedicated about R182 000 per year to respond to what is arguably the most significant threat humankind has ever known.I say likely because no costed plan was ever released to project just how much we need to mitigate or adapt to the health impacts of warmer temperatures.Almost a decade after the country’s previous plan launched we still are largely in the dark — at least publicly — about what it accomplished.
The health department’s current draft document lacks the kind of indicators or goals that would allow policymakers to track its implementation. Here, it may be time to take a page out of the department’s HIV playbook.through a series of national consultations, desk-based reviews and expert consultants. The country’s latest such document includes, for instance, eight specific goals and a set of sub-goals.
As the current climate change plan reads now, it is difficult to understand what the national health department will prioritise in the next five years. We need a strategy that speaks not in broad brushstrokes about the intersection of climate and health, but to specifics and about how they will collide here in South Africa and impact our health system. In this regard, the plan needs to do a better job of integrating existing research.
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