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Background: Instituted under the Paris Agreement, nationally determined contributions (NDCs) outline countries’ plans for mitigating and adapting to climate change. They are the primary policy instrument for protecting people’s health in the face of rising global temperatures. However, evidence on engagement with health in the NDCs is scarce. In this study, we aimed to examine how public health is incorporated in the NDCs, and how different patterns of engagement might be related to broader inequalities and tensions in global climate politics.
Methods: We analysed the NDCs in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change registry submitted by 185 countries. Using content analysis and natural language processing (NLP) methods, we developed measures of health engagement. Multivariate regression analyses examined whether country-level factors (eg, population size, gross domestic product [GDP], and climate-related exposures) were associated with greater health engagement. Using NLP methods, we compared health engagement with other climate-related challenges (ie, economy, energy, and agriculture) and examined broader differences in the keyword terms used in countries with high and low health engagement in their NDCs.
Findings: Countries that did not mention health in their NDCs were clustered in high-income countries, whereas greater health engagement was concentrated in low-income and middle-income countries. Having a low GDP per capita and being a small island developing state were associated with higher levels of health engagement. In addition, higher levels of population exposure to temperature change and ambient air pollution were associated with more health coverage included in a country’s NDC. Variation in health engagement was greater than for other climate-related issues and reflected wider differences in countries’ approaches to the NDCs.
Interpretation: A focus on health in the NDCs follows broader patterns of global inequalities. Poorer and climate-vulnerable countries that contribute least to climate change are more likely to engage with health in their NDCs, while richer countries focus on non-health sectors in their NDCs, such as energy and the economy.
Objective: To examine country engagement with the health impacts of climate change in (1) annual statements in the UN General Debate (UNGD); and (2) the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of the Paris Agreement; and to identify what factors drive country engagement.
Methods: First, we measure engagement by the total references to the health and climate change relationship in each text, using a keyword-in-context search with relevant search terms. Second, we use machine learning models, specifically random forest models, to identify the most important country-level predictors of engagement. Our predictors are political and economic factors, health outcomes, climate change-related variables, and membership of political negotiating groups in the UN.
Findings: For both UNGD statements and NDCs, we find that that low- and middle-income countries discuss the health impacts of climate change much more than high-income countries. We find that the most important predictors of country engagement are related health outcomes (infant mortality rates, maternal death risk, life expectancy), countries’ income levels (GDP per capita), and fossil fuel consumption. Membership of political negotiating groups (e.g. G77 and SIDS) is less important predictors.
Conclusion: Our analysis indicates a North-South division in engagement, and hence there is little to suggest that a health framing of climate change overcomes existing geopolitical divisions in climate change negotiations. Countries who carry the heaviest health burdens but lack necessary resources to address the impacts of climate change are shouldering responsibility for reminding the global community of the implications of climate change for people’s health.
The world has already warmed by more than 1.2C compared with preindustrial levels, resulting in profound, immediate, and rapidly worsening health effects, and moving dangerously close to the agreed limit of maintaining temperatures “well below 2C”. These health impacts are seen on every continent, with the ongoing spread of dengue virus across South America, the cardiovascular and respiratory effects of record heatwaves and wildfires in Australia, western North America, and western Europe, and the undernutrition and mental health effects of floods and droughts in China, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and South Africa. In the long term, climate change threatens the very foundations of human health and wellbeing, with the Global Risks Report registering climate change as one of the five most damaging or probable global risks every year for the past decade.
Left unabated, climate change will have catastrophic effects on the health of present and future generations. Such effects are already seen in Europe, through more frequent and severe extreme weather events, alterations to water and food systems, and changes in the environmental suitability for infectious diseases. As one of the largest current and historical contributors to greenhouse gases and the largest provider of financing for climate change mitigation and adaptation, Europe’s response is crucial, for both human health and the planet. To ensure that health and wellbeing are protected in this response it is essential to build the capacity to understand, monitor, and quantify health impacts of climate change and the health co-benefits of accelerated action. Responding to this need, the Lancet Countdown in Europe is established as a transdisciplinary research collaboration for monitoring progress on health and climate change in Europe. With the wealth of data and academic expertise available in Europe, the collaboration will develop region-specific indicators to address the main challenges and opportunities of Europe’s response to climate change for health. The indicators produced by the collaboration will provide information to health and climate policy decision making, and will also contribute to the European Observatory on Climate and Health.
Every year at the United Nations (UN), member states deliver statements during the General Debate (GD) discussing major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on governments’ perspectives and preferences on a wide range of issues, but have largely been overlooked in the study of international politics. This paper introduces a new dataset consisting of over 7300 country statements from 1970–2014. We demonstrate how the UN GD corpus (UNGDC) can be used as a resource from which country positions on different policy dimensions can be derived using text analytic methods. The article provides applications of these estimates, demonstrating the contribution the UNGDC can make to the study of international politics.
The Lancet Countdown tracks progress on health and climate change and provides an independent assessment of the health effects of climate change, the implementation of the Paris Agreement, and the health implications of these actions. It follows on from the work of the 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change, which concluded that anthropogenic climate change threatens to undermine the past 50 years of gains in public health, and conversely, that a comprehensive response to climate change could be “the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century”.
There has been substantial focus on China’s influence in Africa in recent years. Some argue that China’s growing economic ties with African states have increased its political influence across the continent. This article examines whether trade with China leads African states to adopt more similar foreign policy preferences to China in the United Nations. We examine foreign policy similarity using voting patterns in the United Nations General Assembly and country statements in the United Nations General Debate. The analysis demonstrates that more trade with China has paradoxical effects on foreign policy positions of African states—it leads them to align more closely with US foreign policy positions in the United Nations, except on human rights votes. Our findings suggest that African states are engaged in balancing behavior with external powers whereby African elites seek to play off rival powers against one another in order to strengthen their own autonomy and maximize trade.
Advances in community detection reveal new insights into multiplex and multilayer networks. Less work, however, investigates the relationship between these communities and outcomes in social systems. We leverage these advances to shed light on the relationship between the cooperative mesostructure of the international system and the onset of interstate conflict. We detect communities based upon weaker signals of affinity expressed in United Nations votes and speeches, as well as stronger signals observed across multiple layers of bilateral cooperation. Communities of diplomatic affinity display an expected negative relationship with conflict onset. Ties in communities based upon observed cooperation, however, display no effect under a standard model specification and a positive relationship with conflict under an alternative specification. These results align with some extant hypotheses but also point to a paucity in our understanding of the relationship between community structure and behavioral outcomes in networks.