Climate Change, Public Health impacts and the role of the new digital technologies

Abstract

Health evidence should drive health policies towards health determinants targets. Amongst the environmental health determinants, climate change represents now a clear public health threat. The constant increase of temperatures has multiple consequences on population health, already observed in Europe and elsewhere. The role of healthcare services is paramount, moreover the use of new technologies that can mitigate CO2 emissions and reduce costs while improving healthcare coverage.Reducing the impacts of climate change on the environment and population health is a challenge affecting everyone: it is therefore essential to get actors from all sectors, moreover from the technology side.A scoping review addressed the impact of digital health services on climate change mitigation. Leveraging from previous work on telemedicine and health digital services an impact analysis was done covering both the CO2 mitigation and Costs. An example from a 20 years' telemedicine service is used to exemplify the impact.The impact of a Telecardiology service, as an example of digital service, was addressed and the CO2 mitigation calculated. This service has so far avoided about 2000 flights from Africa to Europe, which means a reduction of more than 16 000 Tons of CO2. From this analysis is complemented with a scoping review showing the evidence from other digital health cases. The optimization of resources is critical in healthcare. In this regard, it is important to assess the actual benefits obtained with the health digital services, giving evidence on the righteousness of the decision-making.Clearly digital health services should be promoted to tackle both health coverage from distance patients and to mitigate climate change footprint and should motivate policy-makers to take this challenge more seriously.This work is contributing to SDG3, improving health, to SDG4, allowing to provide distance health education at relatively low cost and to SDG 13, by reducing the CO2 footprint.