Okay. So as I said, mitigation is absolutely essential, and I think you probably already know what most of these measures are but let me list the main ones. The most important is a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, also energy conservation and efficiency, active transport that is using more walking, cycling, public transportation, forests and soil management to increase carbon sinks, a shift from animal toward plant agriculture that will especially result in less emission of methane. Then finally, universal reproductive health services. I just want to point out for the ladder, that that's actually more primarily a public health measure that has climate change benefits as opposed to a climate change measure that has public health benefits, I'll talk a little bit more about that later. So it's fortunate, it didn't have to be this way, but we're very fortunate that there are very significant immediate health benefits often called co-benefits of climate change mitigation. So these benefits are over and above the benefits due to reducing greenhouse gas emissions itself. Now, that's the purpose of mitigation, but there are these ancillary or side benefits such that, even if climate change were not occurring, these climate change mitigation measures represent critical public health interventions in their own right. So let's take a look at this concretely. So if we decrease fossil fuel burning, we decrease greenhouse gas emissions, but burning a fossil fuels also produces air pollutants like nitrogen oxide, sulfur oxides, particulate matter, and those air pollutants are the ones that kill people directly. So here, you see a scene in China for example of a heavily polluted city where people wearing mask. An air pollution actually is estimated to kill roughly six million people in the world per year. So it's a very significant health problem. We stop burning fossil fuels, we not only deal with the greenhouse gas problem, we also deal to a very large degree with this air pollution that kills millions of people. If we decrease fossil fuel extraction, we decrease a certain occupational health hazards. So what I'm showing here is an X-ray of co-workers pneumoconiosis or black lung disease which is a disease that's endemic in coal miners, very serious disease that often leads to death, certainly leads to disability. If we're not mining coal, then people don't get black lung disease. If we decrease fossil fuel extraction, we also decrease environmental health hazards. So this example is mountain top removal coal mining could see before and after, but such mining produces airborne toxins and dust, contaminated water, flooding, and also ecosystem destruction. So again, decrease fossil fuel extraction because we don't need the fossil fuels, we don't need to burn them has the side benefit of not having to do mountain top removal. So we've seen a boom of hydraulic fracturing or fracking in the last 10 or 15 years or so to mine natural gas in particular. So here's a story from newspaper. Former Health Secretary Pennsylvania didn't seriously study fracking health impacts. Pennsylvania's Former Health Secretary says, the state has failed to seriously study the potential health impacts of one of the nation's biggest natural gas drilling booms. Dr. Eli Avila also says, the state's current strategy is a disservice to people and even to the industry itself because health officials need to be proactive in protecting the public. The lack of any action speaks volumes, said Avila, who is now the public health commissioner for Orange County New York. Don't be as the public, their health comes first. So the point I'm trying to make here is that, we actually don't yet know the full health impacts of fracking partly because we're largely because there's been very little study of it although it's starting to be more. But to the extent that there are adverse health impacts, we have the same issue that I've been talking about. If we decrease or eliminate fracking because we no longer need the fossil fuels because we've converted to renewable energy economy, then we will not have whatever those health adverse health impacts are. A lot of you are probably aware that there's a huge public health problem in the developing world with regard to indoor inefficient cookstoves. They cause indoor air pollution that actually causes several million deaths per year especially to children. So if we convert from these dirty cookstoves to clean efficient cookstoves, we both reduce greenhouse gas emissions because when you burn inefficiently especially, you produce more emissions than necessary, and we would also have this great public health benefit of decrease indoor air pollution in these homes. So if we improve infrastructure for bicycling, as you see this photo from Copenhagen in Denmark at rush hour, then there are fewer people driving their cars. So we have less greenhouse gas emissions, but it also has the health benefit of increased physical activity, decreased air pollution because there are fewer cars on the road and also helps with mental health because it's been well shown that increased physical activity, also increases mental health. So if we shift from animal toward plant agriculture, we have fewer greenhouse gas emissions and as I said especially methane. We also have a healthier diet. There's a lot of data now that a plant-based diet is healthier than an animal-based diet. If we increase urban green space, we have more green, more trees, we're absorbing more, the trees are absorbing CO2, but that also has the health benefits of decreasing the urban heat island effect, providing shade, decreases the urban heat island effect through other mechanisms that I'm going to talk about in a later lecture. We have increased physical activity because people utilize the green space for physical activity and increase mental health. Back to this reproductive health family planning issue. So there are roughly 200 million women in the world with an unmet need for family planning, meaning that, they would like to prevent a pregnancy, but don't have the means to do so. So increased family planning prevents would decrease unintended pregnancies. So that as I mentioned, I would view that as being primary being a public health measure, but it has the side benefit of that, if there are less people in the world, there are fewer greenhouse gas emissions. So the essential lesson is that, climate change mitigation has major immediate health benefits also called co-benefits over and above the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I would submit that, when we're talking about the need for mitigation, these immediate health benefits should be emphasized to help build public support. Because as I've already gone through, these health benefits are major, they could save literally millions of lives around the world, and they could also, it's what we needed to deal with climate change at the same time.
