The Clean Energy Transition’s Missing Metric: Human Health

Earlier this year, the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, in Santa Marta, Colombia, convened representatives from 57 countries to advance a just, orderly, and equitable transition to green energy. According to a new correspondence published in The Lancet, while the conference’s final report makes a powerful case for a rapid global phase-out, “it overlooks the extraordinary health and health-economic benefits of doing so.”

In the letter, Robbie Parks, PhD, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and six co-authors explain that the transition away from fossil fuels offers a quintuple win: healthier populations, enhanced energy security, cleaner environments, more resilient and affordable health systems, and effective climate mitigation.

The authors, who are scholars and scientists in sustainability, climate action, communications, and environmental health, offer three concrete recommendations for bringing health into planning for the green transition:

1. National leaders should convene national dialogues to assess the health harms of fossil fuels and the benefits of phase-out, and to shape transition policies that maximize health, equity, energy security, resilience, and climate gains.
2. The health community should be appropriately resourced to support these dialogues by identifying and quantifying avoidable health harms, health benefits of phase-out, and associated economic returns.
3. The health community must build structures needed to upskill rapidly at scale and to translate research into policy and advocacy efforts required to counter multibillion-dollar fossil fuel public relations, misinformation, and lobbying.

“We must make the case—to the public and policymakers at all levels—that phase-out prevents illness, saves lives, and helps stabilize the supply chains, electricity grids, water supplies, health-care infrastructure, and health workforce on which functioning health systems depend. Metrics and narratives grounded in community harms resonate with lived experience, counter disinformation, and frame the transition around shared prosperity and wellbeing,” the authors write.

Additional co-authors include Julianna Gwiszcz and Edward Maibach, George Mason University; Jessica Newberry Le Vay, University of Oxford; Ebba Malmqvist, Lund University; Courtney  Howard, University of Calgary and York University; and Marina Romanello, University College London.