Journal article

The 2023 report of the MJA-Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: sustainability needed in Australia's health care sector

Paul J Beggs, Stefan Trueck, Martina K Linnenluecke, Hilary Bambrick, Anthony G Capon, Ivan C Hanigan, Nicolas Borchers Arriagada, Troy J Cross, Sharon Friel, Donna Green, Maddie Heenan, Ollie Jay, Harry Kennard, Arunima Malik, Celia McMichael, Mark Stevenson, Sotiris Vardoulakis, Tran N Dang, Gail Garvey, Raymond Lovett Show all

Medical Journal of Australia | Wiley | Published : 2024

Open access

Abstract

The MJA–Lancet Countdown on health and climate change in Australia was established in 2017 and produced its first national assessment in 2018 and annual updates in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. It examines five broad domains: health hazards, exposures and impacts; adaptation, planning and resilience for health; mitigation actions and health co-benefits; economics and finance; and public and political engagement. In this, the sixth report of the MJA–Lancet Countdown, we track progress on an extensive suite of indicators across these five domains, accessing and presenting the latest data and further refining and developing our analyses. Our results highlight the health and economic costs of inact..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by NASA Applied Sciences Program


Funding Acknowledgements

We thank Robert Fawcett, Justin Peter, and John Nairn (all from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology) for indicators 1.1 Exposure of vulnerable populations to heatwaves and 2.2 Climate information for health. Ivan Hanigan's access to data for indicators 1.4 and 3.3 was supported by the Centre for Air Pollution, Energy, and Health Research Data Platform funded by the NHMRC Centre for Safe Air (; ), which received funding from the Australian Research Data Commons for the Integrated National Air Pollution and Health Data project (), and he acknowledges the HEAL (Healthy Environments And Lives) National Research Network, which receives funding from the NHMRC (grant no. 2008937). The Bushfires indicator was generated with support from NASA Applied Sciences Program (grant no. 80NSSC21K0507) and we thank Yang Liu and Qiao Zhu (Emory University) as well as Yun Hang (now at University of Texas Health Science Center) for the Australian data used for this indicator (1.3). We also thank Fay Johnston for assistance with this indicator. We thank Carole Dalin (University College London) for assistance with indicator 3.5 Emissions from agricultural production and consumption. We thank the Lancet Countdown for providing the results for indicators 3.6 Diet and health co-benefits, and 3.7 Health care sector emissions. We thank the NHMRC for providing the data for indicator 5.4 Health and climate change research funding.