Roundup: UNEP urges countries to take environmental health seriously

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) is calling on ministers of environment to take health of people seriously by ensuring that pollution is controlled.

UNEP Chief Scientist Jacqueline Mcglade challenged the policy makers to act fast to help save people from being infected by environment induced diseases.

"Diseases like Ebola, Zika, and Sars are the leading killers in the world hence calling for a solution from environment sector and not health sector alone," Mcglade said on Monday during the launch of Healthy Environment, Healthy People report that has been published by UNEP and other partners.

The report was being launched on the sidelines of the second United Nations Environmental Assembly (UNEA) which kicked off in Nairobi.

She observed that the solution to both communicable and non communicable diseases depends hugely on the proper management of environment.

The Executive Director of Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) Braulio Diaz attributed the increasing of strange diseases to failure to stick with the dietary traditions that provides needed micronutrients.

"It is a fact that healthy ecosystem is critical for healthy people hence the need to preserve the ecosystem," Diaz said.

He noted that climate change is the depriving people of food and called for measures aimed at ensuring food security adding that today one in nine people suffer from food insecurity.

Walker Smith of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) observed that the protection of environment is not a luxury hence the need to take environment sector seriously.

She said that governments have to develop strategies to help control marine liter that she said is threatening the ecosystems in the oceans.

"Humanitarian migration crisis are partly caused by environmental changes hence the role of conventions such as UNEA that comes with treaties and protocols aimed at tackling the menace," UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said.

Steiner said that by depleting the ecological infrastructure of the planet and increasing pollution footprint, many people migrate in pursuit of good life elsewhere.

"From air pollution and chemical exposure to the mining of our natural resource base, we have compromised our life support systems," he added.

The report recommends that governments remove harmful substances from the environment in which people live and work, reduce the use of carbon fuels and thereby emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) through renewable energy, decarbonizes by increasing use of solar, wind and hydropower as opposed to using fossil fuels and also generate the necessary economic activity and value to sustain the world's population with lower resource use, less waste, less pollution and less environmental destruction.

It further calls on governments and development partners to scale up investments in initiatives and programs that address the environment and health nexus to spearhead the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals.

The report was also authored by experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer, and the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions. Endit