Fossil fuels affect all stages of human life, with their consequences starting even before the fuels are burned – releasing climate-heating gases and other pollutants – and extending long after, according to a new report by the Global Climate and Health Alliance.
The effects of fossil fuel extraction and use are also unevenly distributed, the report says, impacting marginalised groups including Indigenous peoples, racial minorities and low-income populations the most, and exacerbating other pre-existing health inequalities in those vulnerable communities.
Published this Tuesday, the flagship report compiles more than 600 scientific citations, case studies from around the world, and testimonials from affected communities and health professionals in every region, from oil spills in Nigeria to coal pollution in India and gas extraction in the United States.
Dr Jemilah Mahmood, executive director at the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, whose testimonial features in the report, said in a statement: “Fossil fuels are not just an environmental crisis – they are a public health emergency… As health professionals, we know the cost of inaction is measured in lives.”
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In an interview with Climate Home News, study co-author Shweta Narayan, campaign lead at the Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA), which unites over 200 health and development organisations, explained that the report – more than a year in the making – focuses on the unseen health effects of fossil fuels.
“It was important to show the scale of the problem that we’re dealing with,” she said. “Unless you understand the scope and the scale, you will not be able to advocate for the appropriate policies for climate action.”
According to the report, there are three main ways for pollutants from fossil fuel activities to enter the body: contact or absorption, ingestion or inhalation. Children are especially vulnerable to inhalation, since they breathe more rapidly than adults and take in more air as well as the pollutants it carries relative to their body weight, and those pollutants may be more damaging to their narrower airways.
In addition, children directly exposed to fossil fuel activities like unconventional oil and gas developments, refineries, major roads and petrol stations show higher rates of cancer, most consistently with leukemia.
Trillions in dirty subsidies
The report authors debunk the popular argument that fossil fuels are the cheapest way to obtain energy. In 2022, estimated global fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion, of which $5.7 trillion represented indirect costs such as healthcare spending, productivity losses and climate-related damages, the report notes.
Children also bear a large share of those costs as the money spent on subsidising fossil fuels diverts public resources from essential services such as healthcare and education.
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Dr. Jeni Miller, the GHCA’s executive director, called on governments to halt “new oil, gas and coal projects, setting clear timelines to phase out existing projects, and ending the shocking $1.3 trillion in direct subsidies that keep this industry afloat”.
Instead, they should invest that sum in public health, clean energy and protecting the communities suffering from the impacts of climate change, she added.
She urged political leaders at the COP30 climate summit in November to recognise fossil fuel dependence as a widespread driver of disease and inequality, as well as planet-heating emissions.
The most affected groups
The report documents how the impacts of coal, oil and gas start even before their extraction and processing, with the worst consequences for those least able to protect themselves.
Exploration and site development often result in environmental destruction, disrupting access to clean water, polluting the air and sometimes displacing people from their homes. One Texas study noted an increase in hospitalisation among children with asthma during periods of gas drilling. Another study from Colombia showed that people exposed to open pit mines were more likely to have DNA damage.
The transportation of fossil fuels can also end up being a health hazard to workers and the environment, especially when disasters like spills and explosions occur. Leaks release harmful pollutants into marine, freshwater and land ecosystems.
Many fossil fuel workers come from already vulnerable communities, including rural areas where poverty is rife and work options are limited, which can push people to labour in hazardous conditions.
The report shows that workers exposed to fossil fuels face an elevated risk of developing cancer and cardio-respiratory diseases that can lead to impairment, disability and premature death. To make matters worse, they often face greater exposure to climate impacts, resulting in “disproportionate health, economic and social harms”, it adds.
And because of their limited political and social power, relocation – or even opposition to the siting of industrial facilities, landfills and extractive operations – is less of an option, which further fuels a cycle of vulnerability, the report says.
These populations are also among the hardest to study, with the health risks they face under-researched, and relevant data and information non-existent or inaccessible, it notes.
Other hard-hit groups include older people with underlying conditions exacerbated by fossil fuel-driven air pollution. One quoted study from China found that increased exposure to sulphur dioxide, mostly from burning coal and oil, was associated with premature mortality.
For pregnant women, exposure to fossil fuel pollutants is associated with early birth, low birth weight and congenital abnormalities including anencephaly, spina bifida, and heart and gastrointestinal defects.
In 2018, air pollution cost the global economy $2.9 trillion through premature mortality, lost labour and diminished quality of life, the report notes, citing a Greenpeace study.
The politics behind the harm
GCHA’s Miller called for the influence of the fossil fuel industry on international climate negotiations to be reined in. Almost 1,800 coal, oil and gas lobbyists attended COP29 last year – a sharp increase from the roughly 500 present at COP26.
“Just as governments once curbed tobacco industry influence, they must now ban fossil fuel lobbying and disinformation,” she added in a statement. “COP30 is the moment to act – not only for the climate, but for people’s health and futures.”
And this lobbying is not limited to climate diplomacy, with Narayan pointing to the negotiations on a global treaty to rein in plastic pollution that ended with no agreement or clear way forward.
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“The disruption of the process itself because of undue influence of petrostates and industry lobbyists was very evident,” she said, noting that all multilateral processes are “riddled with undue influence by the industry. And that undue influence has to be curbed and restricted if we want to protect people’s health and have a livable future.”
The authors of the report call for a just transition away from fossil fuels, defining it as one “shaped by policy frameworks that ensure it is fair, inclusive, and health-promoting”.
That transition must also include the cleanup of existing fossil fuel sites, as the toxins that harm health remain in the environment for a long time – and that remediation should be done by the polluting companies, which often try to avoid it due to the high cost, Narayan told Climate Home.
“That’s why we see them evading the issue of accountability and responsibility,” she said. “But accountability is very important for protecting people’s health.”
The post “Public health emergency”: Report shows fossil fuel impacts on every stage of life appeared first on Climate Home News.
“Public health emergency”: Report shows fossil fuel impacts on every stage of life
An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.