THE METEOROLOGICAL CONGRESS CANNOT DO IT ALONE

November 2, 2012

"Prevention and preparedness are the heart of public health. Risk management is our daily bread and butter. Information on climate variability and climate change is a powerful scientific tool that assists in these tasks. Up to now, this tool has been underutilized... Climate and weather affect the air people breathe, the food they eat, and the water they drink."

This is the point Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, made at her opening speech of the Extraordinary Session of the World Meteorological Congress in Geneva, Switzerland on 29 October, 2012.

The Congress, sponsored by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), plans to finalise a model for the Global Framework for Climate Services. This will focus on four areas that are dependent on an understanding of climate change for their development:

health, agriculture and food security, disaster risk management, and water.

UNISDR chief, Margareta Wahlstrom, emphasised Dr Chan's urgency, stating that:

"Over the last ten years the top 40 recipients of humanitarian aid experienced over 1,500 major reported disasters affecting over 900 million people and causing some 800,000 deaths. Many of these disaster events have been weather related. Many have caused economic losses which have put enormous strains on already fragile states."

It's all well and good to keep an eye on the weather, but unless nations do more to stop it going mad in the first place, the UN's role in this respect will end up being like that of the Red Cross or Red Crescent in a war zone: picking up the pieces. If anything good came out of Hurricane Sandy, it is that the US is being forced to take note.