Show Notes
Sea-level rise is often spoken about in centimetres, forecasts and future scenarios. But what if we understood it as a health emergency that is already reshaping lives, harming bodies and minds, and displacing entire communities?
This week, as a landmark Lancet Commission launches, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac argue that sea-level rise must be understood not just as a climate threat, but as a health crisis currently unfolding. And, as co-chair of the Lancet Commission on Sea-Level Rise, Health and Justice, Christiana brings us inside the thinking behind this urgent new effort.
Christiana speaks to commissioners ‘Ofa Kaisamy, Professor Anne Poelina and Dr Sandro Demaio, who paint a vivid picture of what happens before and as the water arrives. This is a story of food insecurity, damaged clinics and hospitals, disease, displacement, trauma, and the loss of ancestral knowledge and cultural continuity. But it also points to an opportunity to finally see sea-level rise in fully human terms, with those on the frontlines shaping the response.
What changes when we stop treating rising seas as a distant environmental problem and start recognising them as a present health emergency? And what might become possible if the people most affected are no longer treated as victims, but as leaders?
Learn More: 🌊 Read The Lancet Commission launch paper on sea-level rise, health and justice. 🩺 Read Christiana’s opinion piece on health and sea-level rise in the Guardian 🏝️ Explore WHO Western Pacific’s work on climate change and health in the Pacific 📈 Go deeper with the IPCC on sea-level rise and low-lying coasts and islands.
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe
Join the conversation: Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimism Or get in touch with us via this form.
Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Outrage + Optimism
In Digger, Tom Cruise plays an oil tycoon whose rig sets off a tsunami. Within days of release, it was written off as a flop. Christiana Figueres has seen it twice, and she has questions about how quickly that verdict arrived. As she sees it, the film puts the fossil fuel lobby squarely in the frame.
Before she was Christiana Figueres, architect of the Paris agreement, who was she? What did believe in 2015 that she no longer believes?
A ship rams a canoe. The canoe starts to sink. The ship's crew lean over the rail and offer a loan to repair it.
Net Zero was once a radical idea. Now it’s both an accepted global target, and an increasingly toxic political faultline.
The news cameras may be following rising tensions between President Trump and President Pezeshkian of Iran, but deep in the bowels of the United Nations, fifteen countries are about to choose, in private, the person who speaks for 8 billion people.