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How our climate response and coronavirus are connected

·         Coronavirus pandemic will lead to a deeper understanding of the links that bind us globally.

style="mso-list: Ignore;">·         Well-resourced healthcare systems are important to protect us against risks to health, including climate change.

·         The post-pandemic economic resuscitation support will foster health, education, and environmental protection.

We live in an era in which intersecting crises are elevated to a global scale, with unprecedented levels of inequality, environmental destruction and climate destabilization, as well as new increases in populism, conflict, economic instability, and increasing threats to public health. All are crises that slowly tip the balance, challenge our business-as-usual economic model of past decades and allow us to reconsider our next moves.

There are, to some degree, similarities between the present COVID-19 pandemic and some of the other global crises our world faces. All need global-to-local response and long-term thinking; all need science guidance and protection for the most vulnerable among us; and all need political will to make significant changes when faced with existential risks.

In this sense, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic will lead to a deeper understanding of the links that connect us all globally and can help us come to grips with the century's greatest public health threat, the climate crisis.

At the World Health Organization (WHO), where I'm part of the climate change team, we're seeing the catastrophic effects of under-prepared health systems suffering these increasingly frequent shocks. Some of these health effects have a clear signature of climate change, such as the increasing frequency and strength of extreme weather events, or the expanding range of vector-borne diseases such as malaria or dengue. For some, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the relation with climate change is less obvious.

Yet there's one thing that almost all health shocks have in common: they strike the hardest and most fragile. We serve as multipliers of poverty, driving families into severe poverty as we pay for healthcare.

At least half of the world's population needs complete coverage for the most basic health services. As health crises strike – and they'll do so steadily in a business-as-usual scenario – social inequality is maintained and exacerbated, and compensated for with disadvantaged and oppressed lives.

A first lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic and how it applies to climate change is that well-resourced, sustainable health systems with a healthy and empowered health workforce are necessary to protect us from threats to health protection, including climate change. For economies and communities to be sustainable and stable in an era of transition, the austerity policies that have weakened many national health systems over the past decade will need to be reversed.

For example, Haiti's people would have been much more skilled in dealing with and recovering from the devastating effects of 2016's Hurricane Matthew – worsened by climate change – if they had a robust, well-resourced health system in place to sustain them. Similarly, many Iranian lives could have been saved in the early stages of the country's COVID-19 epidemic if its beleaguered healthcare system were better prepared for what would come.

Second, the current pandemic shows how injustice is a significant obstacle to people's health and well-being, and how social and economic disparities materialize in unequal access to healthcare systems. For example, the novel coronavirus' health hazard is, on average, greater for cities and people subjected to higher rates of pollution, particularly people living in poorer areas.

The same refers to the environmental effects of climate change, with one of its main triggers, burning fossil fuels, increasing air pollution, and disproportionately affecting the environmental of those in poverty.

WHO reports that by rising people's environmental and social risk factors, nearly a quarter of the global health burden (measured as illness, death, and financial loss) may be avoided. Creating healthy environments for healthy communities and encouraging Universal Health Coverage (UHC) are two of the most important ways we can minimize long-term health impacts from both the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, and improve our resilience and adaptive ability.

Third, the global health crisis we are in has forced us to radically change our actions to protect ourselves and those around us, to a degree most of us have never experienced before. This temporary gear change may lead to a long-term change in old habits and expectations, leading to public pressure for collective action and successful risk management. Although climate change presents a slower, longer-term health threat, an equally drastic and sustained behavioral shift is required to avoid irreversible harm.

Finally, crises like these offer an opportunity for a recovered sense of shared humanity in which people realize what matters most: their loved ones' health and safety, and by extending their community, country and fellow global citizens' health and safety. Both climate crisis and pandemic unfolding threaten this one thing we all care about.

When we finally conquer the COVID-19 pandemic, we will hopefully maintain that sense of common humanity to restore our social and economic structures and make them stronger, more sustainable and more humane. Therefore, financial and social support programs to sustain and ultimately resuscitate post-pandemic global economy will foster health, education, and environmental protection.

Public health is essentially a democratic decision. A option we face now, and one we will have to make over and over again as we move to a more sustainable, zero-carbon, just and safer future.