Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Implementation of public health measures constitutes one of the main strategies to guarantee sustainability of healthcare systems and to gain not only more life expectancy but more years of healthy life. Among those measures, those which are related to the consequences of climate change on the health of population are specially relevant. The usual approach has not been based in the idea of adaptation of the population habits to such new context of risks derived from climate change. Not only governments and other stakeholders should be involved in the adaptation to climate change from a health perspective. We also need the citizens be involved, adapting many of their conducts and habits to this need context. From a comparative approach we can find different proposals in different States, such as prohibitions, nudges, taxation or information and education. From an ethical and legal approach is important to evaluate how those measures (from prohibitions to education and information) respect proportionality and avoid one of the main risks from developing measures in the area of public health which is mainly discrimination and moral perfectionism. So, through our approach we offer a new perspective from and ethics and Law towards the evaluation of the measures that should be adopted for an adaptation to climate change considering its consequences for health