International medical research is preparing for the upcoming UN summits on a broad front in the service of climate and species protection.

233 editors and editors-in-chief of medical journals simultaneously published an identical editorial this Monday, in which they, on behalf of the health industry, call on politicians to take the climate emergency seriously and to act without wasting any further time.

In addition to the British flagships “Lancet” and “British Medical Journal” and leading journals from Africa, South America, India and China, the leading clinical publication organ from the USA, “New England Journal of Medicine”, will be there.

German medical journals are not on the list.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Nature and Science” section.

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"With a global temperature rise of over 1.5 degrees compared to the pre-industrial era and a further loss of biodiversity, we risk catastrophic damage to health that cannot be reversed," says the editorial. “We cannot wait for the Covid-19 pandemic to end and reduce emissions as quickly as possible.” This is not the first time that the healthcare industry has set an example for an advanced climate policy. Just over a year ago, 40 million people in the healthcare industry signed a letter calling on governments to prioritize sustainable investments in addressing the pandemic. This year, participants at the UN Health Assembly in Geneva also presented the head of the World Health Organization with a catalog of demands,to promote the health authorities more with a view to climate change and the loss of species and to advocate an active environmental policy. WHO Secretary General Tedros Ghebreysus commented on the joint editorial of the medical journals with a view to the latest sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Every tenth of a degree more temperature endangers health and the future, “the risks of climate change could eclipse those of any disease place". The pandemic will end, “there is no vaccine against the climate crisis”.WHO Secretary General Tedros Ghebreysus commented on the joint editorial of the medical journals with a view to the latest sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Every tenth of a degree more temperature endangers health and the future, “the risks of climate change could eclipse those of any disease place". The pandemic will end, “there is no vaccine against the climate crisis”.WHO Secretary General Tedros Ghebreysus commented on the joint editorial of the medical journals with a view to the latest sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Every tenth of a degree more temperature endangers health and the future, “the risks of climate change could eclipse those of any disease place". The pandemic will end, “there is no vaccine against the climate crisis”.

Climate change "scientifically clear"

Those responsible for the medical journals also quote the IPCC: “From a scientific point of view, the matter is“ clear ”and there is no longer any doubt about the reality of climate change.

In the past twenty years, the number of heat deaths among the over-65s has increased by fifty percent worldwide.

The main causes of death are dehydration and kidney failure, skin cancer, the spread of tropical infectious diseases, mental illness, pregnancy complications and cardiovascular and pulmonary complications.

In addition, there are increasing nutritional problems in large parts of the world, which, according to health experts, have worsened with increased drought and the spread of pests: the yields of the main food crops have decreased by 1.8 to 5.6 percent since 1981. This is not just a problem in the third world, the editorial says: "No country, no matter how rich it is, can protect itself from the consequences of such developments."

The medical editors reject the climate policy proposals to rely entirely on technical solutions, and thus to accept exceeding the 1.5 degree target at some point in order to deal with the still largely immature carbon capture and storage technologies and geoengineering - extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They expect governments to be as willing to invest financially in solving the climate crisis as they were at the moment during the Covid 19 pandemic.