A meditation for World Health Day 2008 - in recognition of climate change by Ted Karpf

A Meditation for World Health Day 2008
In Recognition of Climate Change

Preached the Ecumenical Centre on 7 April 2008
By the Reverend Canon Ted Karpf
Partnerships Officer
Office of the Director-General
Partnerships and UN Reform
World Health Organization
Geneva, Switzerland


Let us pray:
“Come Holy Spirit, cleanse the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of your love; send forth your Spirit and, together, we will renew the face of the earth.”

Hear again these words:
"He said to them, "How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” (Luke24:25)

And let me add:
How foolish you are who would have us believe that there is no relationship between our exploitation and abuse of the environment and global warning.

How foolish are you who would have us believe that decades of environmental plunder and our constant craving for the bread of the world, rather than hungering and thirsting after the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation, would leave us in a world without consequence.

How foolish are you who would have us repudiate the voice of the prophets, especially the ones who tell us to minimize our profits as the cost to creation is too high, in order to mislead us in way of life.

“How foolish are you and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.”

Today is World Health Day. This year we are recognizing and highlighting the environment and impact climate change on health. “Impacts of climate change on human health are occurring today and attacking the pillars of public health. They provide a glimpse of the challenges public health will have to confront on a large scale”, WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan warned today.

Here are additional facts to back-up that claim:
Climate impacts human health now and it will be greater in the future.
Climatic events – e.g. floods, drought, heat waves – affect human health today and provide a glimpse of the potential risk to human health in the future.
Projected changes to our climate will affect the health of all of us, but especially so among vulnerable populations in the developing world.
Climate change endangers health in many ways:

- drought threatens food security and increases malnutrition,
- extreme weather events can result in death and injury,
- scarcities and excesses of water increase the burden of diarrhoeal disease,
- heat waves can increase death and illness through cardiovascular and respiratory disease,
- higher temperatures can increase ground-level ozone and speed the onset of the pollen season contributing to asthma attacks,
- changing temperatures and patterns of rainfall are expected to alter the geographical distribution of insect vectors that spread infectious disease – notably malaria and dengue.

And consider some of the realities of our immediate past:
1) European heat wave 2003. Estimates suggest that approximately 70,000 more people died in that summer than would have been expected.
There is now strong evidence that the human influence on climate more than doubled the likelihood of this event occurring.

2) Rift-Valley Fever in Africa. Major outbreaks of Rift Valley Fever are usually associated with heavy rains, which are expected to become more frequent as the climate changes.

3) Malaria in the East African Highlands. In the last 30 years, warmer temperatures have also created more favourable conditions for mosquito populations in the region and therefore for transmission of malaria.

4) Hurricane Katrina, 2005. Over 1800 died and thousands more were displaced. Additionally, health facilities throughout the region were destroyed critically affecting health infrastructure.

5) Recent warming temperatures have moved the freeze line -- which limits transmission of schistosomiasis in China -- further northwards, exposing over 20 million additional people to risk of this disease

What is the way forward? At the World Health Organization, we will continue to safe guard the public health and the family of nations by focusing our efforts on continued technical research, and the issuance of public health guidelines, including recommendations focusing on the water and air quality and the environment impact on disease of climate change. We will continue our surveillance and scrutiny of disease outbreaks, which according to scientists will appear in places where they are seldom or rarely experienced. WHO will continue to hold the world accountable for health and wellbeing so that all people may attain the highest possible level of health.

But this is where it will take more than the collective effort by the governments of the world. Through the international organizations we can only do part of the job. We need people of faith, we need the ecumenical community to hold us all accountable, to continue the prophetic utterances of truth and judgement, justice and mercy, faith and hope. This Centre in the heart of the international community stands as a witness to the world of the prophetic power of faith and the commitment of Christians across denominational boundaries to a higher righteous and more potent justice and vision of wholeness of humankind. Would you do less or be less in the face of environment challenge and climate change.

Can you not call all of us to a reckoning of our spiritual and material values, which if left untended can lead us down the road of apocalypse and destruction? I call upon you in your capacities for justice and peace, for prophetic witness and faithful caretaking to be a model to the world, a light to the nations of what people can do to address environmental degradation and human consumption. Forget not your high calling and faithful witness. Let your hearts burn with demands for restoring to the creation to wholeness and shalom.

I invite you to stand with us in the international communities, among the international organization and bear your standard of judgement and mercy, of calling the world to repentance for environmental damage, and by pronouncing the word of forgiveness that allows all of humanity to move forward in peace together in a restored Garden of Eden.

Notice again the lesson from today.
“Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?’ They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. . . Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread." (Luke 24:31-35)
After they recognized him in the breaking of the bread, they found yet again that Jesus had forgiven them their hardness of heart, their unyielding and disbelieving spirits, and their obsession with loss. He forgave them, liberating them to new life and new possibilities. Can we believe that He would do less for us in the face of our foolishness and slowness to understand?

We then must ask God to come among us and bless us as Jesus did, and recognize that Jesus does come to bless and forgive, and that Jesus will come again, and again, until we get it right. This is our claim and this is our call.

Let us pray:
“O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of the bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all of His redeeming work, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever. Amen.” (Collect for Easter III Book of Common Prayer)