Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has pledged to reduce the carbon emissions of its medical projects to help safeguard the health of people and communities.
Human-caused environmental disruption is having dramatic impacts on the health and well-being of people in Africa and other parts of the world.
Concerns have been raised over the extreme weather events and changing patterns that fuel the spread of deadly diseases like malaria, dengue, and cholera.
According to experts, unless urgent and large-scale mitigation measures are taken, people’s health will increasingly suffer because of the climate emergency.
MSF, in a statement, pledged to reduce emissions by at least 50 percent compared to 2019 levels by 2030.
‘With this target, MSF aims to chart a firm trajectory towards decarbonisation, aligning the organisation with the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change to limit global warming below two degrees Celsius’, the statement read.
It is understood that many of the locations where MSF works today face multiple, overlapping health needs as a result of frequent epidemics, food insecurity, conflict, and displacement.
Health emergencies in places like Somalia or the Sahel region of Africa will increase in scale and severity as the climate emergency grows.
‘We are already seeing how the people we serve in places like Mozambique, Honduras, and Niger have been hit hard by climate shocks’, MSF General Director, Stephen Cornish, said.
‘We will reduce our emissions and review how we conduct our operations. We should have done this years ago; we are already very late.
‘We have a medical and ethical obligation to our patients and their families to not harm them or their environment as a result of our practices’.
Africa, it is understood, has been warming progressively since the start of the last century, and in the next five years, according to the UN World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), northern and southern Africa are likely to get drier and hotter, while the Sahel region gets wetter.
WMO’s Regional Strategic Office Director, Filipe Lucio, had said in October 2020 that Africa needed to take action in terms of adaptation and mitigation.
Source: MSF
Photo source: MSF
