ABSTRACT
Health practitioners have a crucial and distinctive role to play in influencing
public opinion and the policies of national and international governments and
agencies. Through their numbers and the reach of their influence, health prac-
titioners can play a key part in triggering collective shifts in public conscious-
ness and support for action. They can argue powerfully that much of what we
should be doing to mitigate climate change, we should be doing anyway for
good public health reasons. We must use the trust of the public and the weight
of scientific evidence. We must inform, affirm, advocate, innovate and dissemi-
nate, focusing our efforts on the implementation of a global framework that
requires a major reduction in carbon emissions from the rich world and, within
an overall reducing amount of carbon emissions, enables a rise in emissions
for the poor world to assist their development. We need to understand and
use effectively the processes that exert pressure on governments to change,
for example the United Nations, the European Union and the World Health
Organization, and domestically the roles of government departments, non-
governmental organizations and citizen groups. We need to learn from the
past, for example the control of tobacco, how to overcome ‘the manufacture
of uncertainty’. We need to work with and support other like-minded groups
to develop a global social movement.
