You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 183 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Sick, O, sick!1
Reaction Guidelines for Health
This is a resource for health. The goal is to have procedures you can pick off the shelf and start putting in place when it’s too late to avoid disaster.
Climate change is an extreme health hazard
According to the WHO:
Climate change is already impacting health in a myriad of ways, including by leading to death and illness from increasingly frequent extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, storms and floods, the disruption of food systems, increases in zoonoses and food-, water- and vector-borne diseases, and mental health issues. Furthermore, climate change is undermining many of the social determinants for good health, such as livelihoods, equality and access to health care and social support structures. These climate-sensitive health risks are disproportionately felt by the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, including women, children, ethnic minorities, poor communities, migrants or displaced persons, older populations, and those with underlying health conditions.2
Is SF ready to respond to these hazards?
Heat? No.3
Flooding? No.4
Food disruption? No.5
Disease? No.6
Mental health issues? Jobs? Equity? Let’s examine those, and disease, in more detail below.
Mental health resources
There are already not enough resources in SF’s schools. There are already not enough resources at SF Kaiser for Kaiser patients. There are already not enough resources for SF’s unhoused population. Health plans already provide insufficient coverage. There are already insufficient beds, facilities, skilled nurses, therapists, etc. in SF. All of which means San Francisco has insufficient resources to respond to the mental health impacts of climate change.
Jobs
The shallow pool of livelihoods San Francisco has to offer became even shallower during the covid pandemic; multiple and more frequent pandemics are predicted due to climate change. Few jobs pay a living wage for SF. SF lacks job diversity and jobs that pay living wages. SF has very few jobs that focus on adapting to climate change, and those that do rarely provide a living wage. All of this makes it extremely unlikely SF has sufficient resources to provide jobs that people can live on in the face of climate change.
Equity
The legacy of redlining permeates San Francisco. From birth to death, through education and employment, spanning every area of life from access to food and medical care to wages and life expectancy, where you live in SF makes a HUGE difference in how you live. In fact, we are famous for our enormous income gap. All of which means SF will protect the wealthy from climate change, but not the middle class or poor. This is already happening.7
Disease
We have top-in-the-world medical research facilities. We have multiple experiences with coping with pandemics. We are a very wealthy city.
We have poor distribution of basic health facilities and huge health disparities based on income and redlining. We have enormous differentials both in how the rich and poor experience illness and in outcomes. We have lots and lots of poverty in this city.
All of which means SF does not have the resources to respond sufficiently to diseases caused by climate change.
We’re not in a healthy place.
We need robust, not fragile. What we’ve got right now is very fragile.
FOOTNOTES
1. Regan in King Lear, Act 5 Scene 3.
2. “Climate change and health”. World Health Organization. Accessed 1 November 2022. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health.
3. See Strike letter week 172: Heat Reaction Guidelines.
4. See Strike letters for week 164 (Sewage), 165 (Gray Water), 166 (Potable Water), 170 (Precipitation), and 171 (Sea Level Rise)
5. See Strike letter week 178: Food Reaction Guidelines.
6. See Strike letter week 172: Heat Reaction Guidelines.
7. Building low and moderate income housing on Treasure Island, when ⅓ of the island will be underwater in the near future is a prime example.