ABSTRACT
Climate change action can (i) mitigate the rate and magnitude of climate change by reducing greenhouse gases, (ii) help individuals, species, communities, and ecosystems adapt and adjust to a new climate reality, and (iii) promote resilience to recover from impacts, resist changes, and remain robust in the face of climate change. Animal health-sector actions protect animals from the effects of climate change and protect animal assets that people use to cope with climate change. The need for animal health action is growing at a faster pace than the evidence available to select effective, efficient, acceptable, and sustainable actions. Actions need to consider not only the climate change harms that may come from animals or afflict animals, like new diseases, but also how to avoid worsening climate conditions due to the ways we manage and care for animals. To be fully effective, actions must not only tend to the preventive and curative functions of the health sector, but must also protect and manage the determinants of health that fall outside their usual scope of practice. Harm reduction perspective and strategies use pragmatic, multidisciplinary approaches to remove barriers to implementing knowledge to protect health in situations where the hazard or harmful situation cannot be eliminated in the near future, such as with climate change. Harm reduction processes help create conditions that incrementally make the world healthier by reducing the total amount and impact of harms to animals through locally developed collaborative actions while the battle to change our climate altering activities continues.
