Climate Work in Poland

Brussels — As part of our work on climate change, Dr Pendo Maro from Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) and Christina Reinards from the Health and Environmental Alliance (HEAL) were in Poland on 19 -23 September 2011 to share recent findings on the health and economic benefits of tackling climate change with senior government officials and other top policy makers in Warsaw and Poznan.

The aim was to convince senior decision-makers that stronger targets on climate change would substantially benefit public health and the economy in Poland.

We worked together with our Polish partner, Urszula Stefanowicz from the Polish Climate Coalition and other colleagues, who kindly organised and facilitated a workshop with Polish civil society working on climate and energy, the official meetings and regular briefings, in Warsaw.

In Poznan, Pendo gave a presentation at the conference “Effectively and ecologically. Implementation of energy efficiency projects in healthcare”, describing impacts, benefits of tackling climate change from our NOW report and examples of three hospitals that HCWH Europe visited this year. The conference brought together over 100 people, including from the European Commission, architects, hospital administrators, LCB Healthcare network members from different countries in the EU, representative from the Ministry of Health and other experts.

The European Union's current target of a 20% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 is too low to mitigate harmful climate change. According to our research (the NOW report) by moving to a 30% target, EU member states would reap health benefits of up to 30.5 billion Euros by 2020. Poland would achieve savings of up to 4 billion Euros in 2020 (approximately 13% of the total gains) made up, for example, of over 500 fewer cardiac and respiratory hospital admissions annually from 2020 onwards and almost 400,000 fewer working days lost each year from 2020.

See our Press release and Pendo’s presentation for more information.

Health Care Without Harm is an international coalition of more than 500 organizations in 53 countries, working to transform the health care sector worldwide, without compromising patient safety or care, so that it is ecologically sustainable and no longer a source of harm to public health and the environment. Visit the HCWH website for more information.