Medical evidence crucial in holding polluters accountable for harming health

Advances in attribution science are opening up new routes for climate justice; Health professionals everywhere should play their part in this process

BMJ Group

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Medical and scientific evidence is proving invaluable in holding public authorities accountable for the impact of unlawful air pollution on people’s health, say experts in The BMJ’s climate issue today.

Gaia Lisi and Rupert Stuart-Smith at the University of Oxford say that relatively few studies attributing health impacts to climate change have been published so far, but as this research field matures, methods are becoming more widely recognised, opening up new routes for climate accountability.

They describe recent cases where medical and scientific evidence has been used to defend human rights to health.

For example, in the UK, the inquest into the death of 9-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah concluded that exposure to high levels of air pollution contributed materially to her death, while in a case against Italy, the European Court of Human Rights used peer reviewed research to establish a “real and imminent risk” to life.

Similarly, in a series of civil liability cases in France, medical evidence was used to prove causal links between short term peaks in air pollution and aggravation of respiratory symptoms in children.

And they say scientific evidence demonstrating the human health consequences of climate change is likely to assume greater importance in lawsuits in national, regional, and international forums following recent advisory opinions on climate change by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and International Court of Justice saying that states have specific duties to protect the health of individuals from life threatening effects of climate change.

In lawsuits concerning environmental pollution, they also point out that medical experts have had a key role in helping courts understand the protections needed to uphold health related laws, be it through conducting research underpinning legal arguments and judicial decisions, acting as expert witnesses, or providing third party evidence.

“Improved understanding of the health consequences of climate change could have a similar effect, clarifying the extent to which states are meeting their legal obligations to protect health, and opening up routes for climate justice where they fall short,” they conclude.

In a linked article, Laura Clarke at ClientEarth and Hugh Montgomery at University College London, say these landmark court decisions mean that big emitters, both states and companies, can no longer feign ignorance about the impacts of their activities.

“As attribution science strengthens further, we expect to see more class actions and damages claims brought by climate affected communities which, when they scale, will change the calculations and business models of big emitters,” they add.

They suggest that health professionals can help in characterising and appropriately attributing cause of deaths and disease resulting from the direct and indirect impacts of climate change, such as the direct health consequences of heatwaves on kidney and heart disease, or reproductive health.

However, attribution to socioeconomic impacts will require the development of new models, they note.

Medical professionals can also drive action by helping to support legal interventions where those responsible for high greenhouse gas emissions are wilfully indifferent or unresponsive, they add.

“If we are to make progress on emissions, action will require holding big polluters to account through the courts. Medical professionals, everywhere, should play their part in this process,” they conclude.

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Journal

The BMJ

DOI

10.1136/bmj.r1568 

Method of Research

Commentary/editorial

Article Title

Medical evidence drove legal action to clean up the air we breathe—climate justice may be next

COI Statement

GL is employed as a legal associate at the Climate Litigation Network, a not-for-profit foundation based in the Netherlands. RSS discloses funding from the Wellcome Trust and Quadrature Climate Foundation. HM is the (all positions unpaid) co-chair of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change; co-chair, Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change; co-lead, UCL MSc on health and climate change; member of the sustainability advisory board at Chiesi Pharmaceuticals; and sustainability co-lead for the UK Intensive Care Society. HM iscofounder of the charity funded non-profit organisation Real Zero, which tries to drive action on climate change by leveraging the healthcare economy. LC is trustee, Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change.

 

Tie climate action to protecting a way of life to increase motivation, study says

Study of participants from six countries including UK and USA finds reducing psychological distance from impacts of climate change strongest driver of increased effort

University of Birmingham

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People need to feel that climate change is affecting them now or that taking action is a patriotic act for their country to overcome apathy towards environmental efforts, a new global study has found.

 

In a paper published in Communications Psychology today, a global team of researchers led by the University of Birmingham have found that motivational interventions to successfully make climate action more important to people include showing how climate change is happening now and affecting them or others like them.

 

The research team worked with participants from six countries around the world: the UK, USA, Bulgaria, Greece, Sweden and Nigeria. People who didn’t experience one of the interventions were less motivated to exert physical effort to help climate causes than for when effort helped tackle starvation. However, some interventions presented before measuring motivation removed this bias, increasing relative motivation to benefit the environment.

 

The most effective idea presented to participants was to address psychological distance – the feeling that climate change doesn’t personally affect them or those around them. This intervention presented information about how climate change affected them locally for instance.  The second uses the psychology of system justification – the idea that the current system of living and doing things is the right one. This intervention showed how climate change threatened participants’ way of life, for example floods in the UK destroying Britons’ homes, and presented climate action as a patriotic act to prevent this.

 

Dr Jo Cutler from the University of Birmingham and a lead author of the paper said: “From cycling rather than driving to organising waste for recycling, many of the actions we can take to tackle climate change require us to exert physical effort. This global study found that participants around the world can be responsive to interventions that encourage climate action. We found that the most effective interventions were those that show climate change is already affecting people and their way of life may be changed or lost due to climate change. Interventions using this information led to participants being as willing to put in effort as for a more universally recognised cause like ending world hunger.”

 

“Lots of previous research on climate change simply asks people about their attitudes or behaviours they plan to do but there is no incentive for them to be honest. In our experiment, if people want to help, they have to work hard for it. We hope this approach will become more common in future work.”

 

Participants taking part in the study were asked a series of screening questions to assess their beliefs and attitudes about climate change, before taking part in tests to assess their willingness to act.

 

Participants were asked to make a physical effort to raise money for a climate-based charity, or a charity seeking to end world hunger. Prior to engaging in the physical effort, participants received one from a range of 11 different interventions (or none). The most successful interventions were::

• System justification: Text and images framed climate change as a threat to participants’ way of life and encouraged pro-environmental behaviour as patriotic; and
• Decreasing psychological distance. Climate change was presented as an immediate, local threat, and participants reflected on how it affects them personally.

Interventions that were less successful in overcoming bias include:

• Scientific consensus: Participants saw a message and graphic emphasising that 99% of climate scientists agree climate change is real and caused by humans; and
• Letter to future generations. Participants wrote a letter to a future child or other family member, describing their efforts to protect the planet and how they wish to be remembered.

 

The research team also found individual predictors of effort to help the environment included their personal belief that climate change is real and support for pro-environmental policies.

 

Professor Patricia Lockwood from the University of Birmingham and a senior author of the paper said: “As the world prepares to gather for COP30 in Brazil this year, individual and collective citizen action is an essential step towards making a meaningful difference to prevent climate change that affects every part of the world.

 

“Our findings show that despite how powerful some interventions might feel to sway us on climate action, when it comes to prosocial behaviour we as humans are by and large motivated by what feels immediate and close to us.

 

“Making climate action a patriotic duty for every citizen in every country around the world is a tool that we can adopt now to try to limit human-caused climate change.”

 

The study’s authors note that the paper doesn’t look at the difference in interventions between participants from different countries, due to the numbers of people taking part.

 

The University of Birmingham is leading research to help mitigate and adapt to the risks and impacts associated with climate change. The University has been awarded UNFCCC Observer Status which means that its experts can contribute to the vital discussions taking place at COP30.

 

Research at Birmingham, including at the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action addresses the reality of climate change through transforming health, environment, and society – sustainably supporting people and planet. Its researchers work with industry, academic and policy partners to accelerate progress on UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) towards the 2030 Agenda.

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Journal

Communications Psychology

DOI

10.1038/s44271-025-00332-4 

Method of Research

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Psychological interventions that decrease psychological distance or challenge system justification increase motivation to exert effort to mitigate climate change

Article Publication Date

5-Nov-2025

 

Can COP30 Come to Terms With the AI Energy Boom?

By Editorial Dept - Nov 05, 2025

• AI’s massive computational demand is fueling unprecedented global electricity growth, led by U.S. and Chinese data centers.
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• Rising reliance on backup fossil generation and strained supply chains threaten climate progress and energy affordability.
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• To align AI expansion with sustainability, leaders and tech giants must move from voluntary pledges to enforceable, round-the-clock clean power strategies.

Will climate negotiations move beyond voluntary pledges to establish clear regulatory mandates and carbon pricing signals that reflect the environmental costs of computation? Global leaders will be compelled to adopt a dual perspective – acknowledging AI’s profound potential as a climate-action accelerator while confronting its rapidly expanding environmental footprint and the need for a robust global governance framework. 

AI is the single biggest driver of new electricity demand 

With both foremost world powers leading the surge in data center power demand, their burden to reduce emissions will likely be a focal point of conversation at COP30. The development and deployment of advanced AI, particularly large generative models such as ChatGPT, is the primary force driving the exponential growth in global power demand for data centers. Rystad Energy projects that power consumption from data centers will more than double by 2030 and escalate to 2,700 terawatt-hours (TWh) globally by 2050, from approximately 400 TWh in the early 2020s, with the US and China leading this expansion. These models, designed to generate original content by learning from colossal datasets, require an ever-increasing computational load.  

Power sources matter for data center workloads

Data centers require round-the-clock power to maintain core digital services. A brief power failure can corrupt data, cause physical equipment damage, halt billions of transactions, and violate the demanding five-nines (99.999%) uptime guarantees agreed upon with customers. 

To ensure this essential reliability, facilities utilize redundancy layered systems, which start from grid connectivity and are often connected to multiple lines from different substations. They also deploy uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, which are large banks of batteries that provide an instantaneous electrical bridge of typically five to 15 minutes when grid power fails. Finally, they have backup sources such as diesel and gas generators that take over from UPS systems until grid power is restored.  

Data center demand for backup power generation is impacting the supply chain of gas power generation. Significant capital expenditure escalation, with price inflation exceeding 300%, and prolonged lead times of over five years for high-efficiency gas turbines, also known as combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT), pose a critical concern for hyperscale data center deployment. Most importantly, this sharp price increase is simultaneously eroding the economic viability of new thermal base-load power plants, particularly impacting developing economies that are attempting to expand their thermal generation capacity. 

24/7 clean power is the key to ensuring progress isn’t sacrificed for compliance 

Major tech companies, such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, are among the world’s largest corporate purchasers of renewable energy, often utilizing power purchase agreements (PPAs) to achieve 100% renewable energy on an annual, global basis, thereby driving private sector investments in the clean energy transition. Simply buying enough renewable energy annually to match global consumption does not mean the data center is running on clean energy every hour. When the sun sets or the wind stops, the data center continues to draw power from the local grid, which often includes sources of fossil fuels. The true challenge is to match a 24/7 carbon-free energy supply. This means that every kilowatt-hour consumed each hour of the day must come from local, carbon-free sources. Achieving this requires significant investment in new, diverse renewable and clean base-load generation capacity, improved grid flexibility, and advanced energy storage solutions. 

Data centers and their water-positive strategy

Beyond electricity, data centers are major water consumers, primarily for cooling the heat-generating information technology (IT) equipment. This demand intensifies resource competition in drought-prone and water-stressed communities, and climate hazards further threaten data center resilience. To mitigate this impact, some developers have adopted a "water positive" strategy, meaning that a company returns more freshwater to communities and the environment than it withdraws. These strategies typically involve prioritizing water-efficient cooling technologies, utilizing reclaimed wastewater or closed-loop recirculation, or selecting a more climate-conscious site.  

The rapid growth of AI, particularly in large data center clusters, presents significant challenges for climate negotiations. The economic efficiency promised by generative AI comes at the expense of grid stability and sustains a carbon lock-in. The rapid increase in load pressures power infrastructure to extend the life of high-carbon energy assets and pass billions in upgrade costs onto consumers. These issues will be central to discussions at COP30.

By Rystad Energy

 

Integrating children’s health into climate adaptation measures

Weill Cornell Medicine

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image: 

Dr. Ilan Cerna-Turoff

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Credit: Travis Curry

A Weill Cornell Medicine investigator and other members of a technical advisory group to the World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund have outlined measures that nations can take to ensure that children’s health is accounted for within climate change goals. The authors discuss concrete and achievable indicators in a commentary published Oct. 1 in The Lancet Planetary Health.

“Children have specific needs that often get overlooked,” said lead author Dr. Ilan Cerna-Turoff, an assistant professor of epidemiology in emergency medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. “We’re making sure that doesn’t happen.”

The topic is particularly relevant as world leaders gather for the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belém, Brazil to discuss how to measure their countries’ progress toward adapting to climate change.

“When they met at COP28 in November of 2023, world leaders made very broad commitments, but they didn’t have concrete indicators for measuring progress,” Dr. Cerna-Turoff said, “and how are you going to keep to your commitments without metrics?”

To rectify the situation, the United Nations, government representatives, regional governance bodies and civil society groups proposed a list of candidate indicators to assess progress, totaling 5,339 distinct indicators related to the impacts of climate change. “It was an enormous list,” Dr. Cerna-Turoff said, “that covered multiple domains of health and wellbeing but did not have an explicit focus on child health.”

Dr. Cerna-Turoff and the co-authors identified six indicators from the original list pertinent to child health, which could be measured in at least 50% of countries globally. To those six, they suggested 11 additional standardized indicators, making a total of 17. The final list spans childhood mortality rates to metrics related to nutrition and vaccination coverage. Dr. Cerna-Turoff and the co-authors are advocating for signatories to the Paris Agreement to adopt these 17 indicators at COP30.

Whether signatories to the Paris Agreement adopt all 17 indicators or chart a separate course, Dr. Cerna-Turoff thinks that increasing standardized measurement makes global child health data more readily available, which supports other targets, like the Sustainable Development Goals, and opens valuable opportunities to analyze how the climate change agenda is influencing child health. Combining communicable disease data with information about flooding or heat, for instance, “could pinpoint the specific effects of these weather systems on health outcomes,” he said. He further hopes the specificity of the data will increase, disaggregating children by age and economic status, for instance, so global leaders can make sure they are protecting the most vulnerable.

Ultimately, Dr. Cerna-Turoff hopes to see signatories to the Paris Agreement include children in assessing progress and impact of climate adaptation on health. “Children ultimately will inherit the world that we create today, and we can’t afford to leave the youngest members of our society behind,” he said.

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Journal

The Lancet Planetary Health

Article Title

Standardising the measurement of child health indicators within global climate adaptation