Interview of Nick Watts

Hi, my name is Doctor Nick Watts. I’m an Australian and I’m the Executive Director of the Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change.

We are an international collaboration of 27 UN agencies, academic institutions scattered across the world dedicated to tracking progress on one of the most important issues to human health: global warming, global environmental change or climate change.

In the words of the 2009 Lancet Commission, climate change is the greatest global health threat of the 21st century. It threatens to undermine the essential tenets of good health, the social and the environmental determinants, with no individual, no country, no population immune.

Given this, given the work that the health profession has done, we have a duty to respond to climate change to help our health systems, our hospitals, our clinics adapt; to help our countries respond and reduce our carbon emissions and realize the health benefits that result from that.

That’s why I’m excited to come to France to support the French Red Cross, to support the International Red Cross and Red Crescent in their first ever health and climate change conference; the first ever humanitarian COP.