The path towards a healthy climate will be a rocky one in the coming year. December's global negotiations in Paris are a crucial crossroads for choosing between bold new routes to health through well-designed climate action or continuing to threaten human survival and wellbeing. Meanwhile, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement
Alexandra Macmillan & Rhys Jones: TPP must not block the path to healthy climate action
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The text of the proposed agreement was finally made public recently. As suspected, the TPP will allow international companies to sue governments for making decisions that threaten their profits through Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions. Similar provisions are already being used elsewhere to reverse, slow down or prevent laws designed to protect health from industrial pollution. In other words, governments are successfully being forced to put the profits of the world's richest few ahead of their own people's health.
Companies who profit from climate pollution are responsible for a disproportionate number of ISDS cases. In recent examples, the German government has been sued for placing restrictions on coal burning, while the Canadian government in Quebec is also being sued for placing a temporary ban on injecting undisclosed chemicals into the ground to extract natural gas. Both of these bans were as much about protecting people's health from air and water pollution now as they were about longer-term protection from climate change.
In response to these cases, and with their own version of the TPP looming, the European Parliament has adopted a resolution to protect the forthcoming Paris negotiations from existing and future trade agreements. This is a powerful statement by one of the world's largest economic blocs that climate action must not be derailed by the vested interests of fossil fuel companies.
New Zealand needs to insist on a similar climate 'carve out' from trade agreements that we're involved in, including the TPP.
But let's be perfectly clear: such a carve out would only be aiming to make a bad deal for health just a little less bad. The requirement for such an exemption indicates that the TPP is deeply flawed; if the agreement included protection of government sovereignty to make laws, no such 'carve outs' would be needed.
We have a brief window right now between agreeing to the TPP in principle and cementing it into law. New Zealanders from all walks of life have been demonstrating their concern about the TPP and need to continue to voice their resistance to its passage into law as an assault on our democracy and our health.
In the meantime, a contingency for the climate is also needed in the TPP. In the face of New Zealand's irrational reluctance to walk away from a bad deal, a climate 'carve out' may be our best chance for a healthy climate future.
Climate change is a medical emergency that will affect the health and wellbeing of everyone in the world including New Zealanders. We still have time to choose the path of opportunity rather than the path of catastrophe - but not if we hand the reins of climate governance to fossil fuel companies.
Dr Alexandra Macmillan is a public health medicine specialist and senior lecturer in environmental health at the University of Otago.
Dr Rhys Jones (Ngāti Kahungunu) is a public health medicine specialist and senior lecturer in Māori health at the University of Auckland.
They are co-convenors of OraTaiao: The New Zealand Climate and Health Council.