Climate Change and Public Health Law

Belinda Reeve and Belinda Bennett  

Climate change has wide ranging impacts on health, some of which are direct, while others operate through complex causal mechanisms.^[1] Climate change has current and anticipated impacts on unintentional injuries, infectious diseases, cardiovascular disease and mental health. It is anticipated to have devastating impacts on the conditions needed to ensure healthy lives, through water scarcity, ecosystem degradation and diminished agricultural capacity, along with increasing global hunger and food insecurity, as well as associated health risks, such as the development of non-communicable diseases (‘NCDs’).^[2] The health impacts of climate change vary depending on the geographic region concerned, as well as mediating factors such as socio-economic status and ethnicity, with those in low-income groups, people with disabilities and older people being particularly vulnerable.^[3]

The interactions between climate health and the social determinants of health (access to income, education, adequate housing and other resources necessary for good health) have the potential to widen inequalities in health status between the worst off and the best off in Australia.^[4] Australia is also particularly vulnerable to climate change, and in response to growing evidence of its health impacts, leading public health bodies have declared climate change a health emergency and urged governments to accelerate their response to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.^[5] In December 2023, the Australian Government released the National Health and Climate Strategy, which takes a whole-of-government approach to addressing the health impacts of climate change, as well as building resilience to climate change in the health system and mitigating the health system’s climate impacts.^[6] The government’s actions on heat and heatwaves, air quality, communicable disease, food and nutrition, the built environment and physical activity are all core public health concerns, and are therefore relevant to public health law — the central focus of this chapter.