Combating climate change will reduce the huge toll of 7 million deaths from air pollution as well as generating jobs in green energy, former California Governor and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a surprise appearance today at the opening plenary of the 24th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 24), in Katowice, Poland. Continue reading ->
Member states of the World Health Organization last week gathered for the first-ever Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health, and made a set of commitments in the time frame of the year 2030. The United Nations secretary general hailed the commitments as a "critical step" toward his own summit planned for 2019. WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (Dr Tedros) in remarks at the close of the conference highlighted the number of deaths from air pollution and laid out members' commitments from the meeting. These include sustainable energy sources for health facilities, establishing a multistakeholder action platform, educating and empowering health workers to bring change, scaling up WHO's air pollution programme, and looking into stronger institutional mechanisms such as possibly an air quality convention. Continue reading ->
One hundred years after the great Spanish flu pandemic, World Health Organization members today underlined their satisfaction with the organisation’s framework to get countries best prepared for the next pandemic: The WHO Executive Board agreed on keeping most of the funds coming to the framework for preparedness measures, and a smaller portion for response measures, unless emergency strikes. Continue reading ->
A delegation of heads of biotechnology companies visited Geneva this month to present the International Confederation of Biotechnology Trade Associations (ICBA). The ICBA was created in 2012, but is now looking to make its voice heard in Geneva and inform policy discussions, and is finding it is not easy to become an observer in some organisations. They also underlined the importance of intellectual property for the biotech sector, in particular to attract indispensable capital. The delegation sat down with Intellectual Property Watch’s Catherine Saez to talk about their Geneva visit. Continue reading ->