corporations accountable for violating their right to a safe, clean and healthy environment. Moreover, young health professionals are working with their institutions to include climate change in curricula and young practitioners are prescribing connecting with nature to improve patients’ mental well-being. They are also catalysing the decarbonisation of their healthcare systems by integrating climate mitigation actions within service delivery, governance and workforce training. Many use their voices in community-led movements to highlight that the climate crisis is a health crisis and that climate action is action for health. Nevertheless, youth continue to face multiple challenges that restrict their meaningful participation and their identification beyond only beneficiaries or victims of policymakers’ decisions and lethargic responses in matters of existential importance. There is a growing need to reorient institutional structures to integrate youth, not as add-ons, but as natural stakeholders in formal roles such
THE RIGHT TO HEALTH The COP27 presidency also recognised the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in the Sharm El Sheikh Implementation Plan. This was the first such mention of health in a COP outcome decision. The presidency also established the breakthrough agreement to provide loss and damage funding to the most affected countries in response to the catastrophic impacts of climate-related events. To further elevate the political profile of the climate-health nexus and respond to the health-related losses and damages communities are experiencing from climate hazards, COP28 in the United Arab Emirates will host the first-ever Health Day in 2023, and an inter-ministerial meeting on climate and health that will bring health ministers together for the first time with ministers of the environment and finance. This presents an opportunity to call attention to the science and evidence-based interventions that protect the health of populations as the climate changes and to reduce carbon emissions with proven benefits to health. In addition, technical assistance and finance mobilisation will be generated for climate and health interventions. Climate justice and intergenerational equity can be a new ‘narrative of hope’ and only through intentional integration and collaboration can we address the climate and health emergency and the systemic inequalities my generation is living through. We must connect, listen
as youth advisory groups and councils such as the World Health Organization’s Youth Council. Climate and health policies should be grounded in the needs and insights of the most vulnerable youth, including young women, refugees and internally displaced youth in armed conflict. This requires establishing sustainable and intergenerational mechanisms for their participation and also for the emergence of youth-led solutions and implementation pathways. To respond to this, Egypt’s presidency of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in 2022 took progressive action to listen to young people and demonstrate that the inclusion of health and intergenerational equity is far from optional. This was exemplified by my appointment as the first official youth envoy of the president of the Conference of the Parties, a critical turning point for meaningful youth engagement in the highest level of climate decision-making. I worked on integrating young people’s ideas and perspectives into the design and delivery of COP27 and on facilitating opportunities for diverse youth voices to be heard and valued. A dedicated children and youth pavilion was set up for the first time, strategically positioned in the negotiation zone to empower young delegates to leverage their frontline experiences, intergenerational solidarity and equity-based values at the negotiations, as well as constructive technical and policy inputs.
and work together across silos and generations to build the healthy and secure world we all want and deserve. ▪
OMNIA EL OMRANI Omnia El Omrani is a climate change and health junior policy fellow at the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London. She was appointed the first Youth Envoy for the President of the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2022, having attended three previous Climate Change Conferences representing the International Federation of Medical Students’ Association.
A medical doctor from Egypt, she has served as a commissioner at the Lancet Commissions on Sustainable Healthcare and Post-COVID Population Health, a member of the first Youth Sounding Board of the European Union DG-INTPA, an associate at Women Leaders for Planetary Health and a member of the UNICEF Youth Leaders Program. X-TWITTER @omniaelomrani1
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Health: A Political Choice – From Fragmentation to Integration
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