Many initiatives prioritise immediate and near-term climate risk reduction which reduces the opportunity for transformational adaptation (high confidence)
(source: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability)
In West Yorkshire, we have an ambitious strategy which aims to reduce inequalities in our communities as well as weave climate action into everything we do. Our Partnership has an agreed vision for the future of health, care, and wellbeing in West Yorkshire, where all partners are working together so people can thrive in a healthy, equitable, safe, trauma informed, and sustainable society.
Within that overarching strategy, we have 10 big ambitions. Ambition number nine is:
“We aspire to be a leader in the delivery of environmentally sustainable health and social care through increased investment, mitigation and culture change throughout our system.”
In a future where we fail to act, we will fail to achieve our ambitions and vision. Instead, we will see more morbidity, mortality, and inequality, and the system will struggle to cope, eventually failing under impossible demand. We can expect:
- More people suffering with cardiac disease
- More people developing and dying of respiratory conditions
- More people in food poverty and facing foodborne illness
- Travel and transport difficulties for patients, residents, and staff
- Increased malaria and other vector-borne diseases
- Disrupted supply chains with essential supplies increasingly unavailable
- New and emerging communicable diseases
- Significantly increased inward migration to the region from other parts of the UK facing extreme weather and flooding
- Community collapse leading to poorer population mental health, trauma, violent crime and possibly increased suicide rates
But that future is not pre-determined. In a future where we get this right, we can see better outcomes through better models of care, including:
- More people helped to stay in better health and remain independent
- Care closer to home
- Digital appointments as standard
- Comfortable, efficient, and well-insulated homes safe from extreme temperatures
- Health and care staff who travel actively on flood-resilient green and blue routes/biodiversity corridors, with local public sector anchor organisations leading the way in their adoption of active travel
- Cleaner air leading to fewer respiratory, cardiac, and neurodegenerative conditions
- Good-quality housing, and employment in a sustainable, fair local economy
- A regenerative, local food system that ensures all people can afford a good diet
- Places and system designed to minimise, and prepare for, new infectious diseases
This will not be achieved by the work of individuals in isolation. We must act in collaboration so that the sum of our improvements is much more than each one of us, or each organisation could do on their own.