U.S. walks away from clean world

Initial major policy moves by reelected President Donald Trump such as his pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Agreement, while not unexpected, were, nevertheless, met with extreme concern and regret by the international public health community, climate change scientists, and proactive environmentalists worldwide.

Trump has trounced the Geneva, Switzerland ww based WHO, alleging that it has mishandled the Covid-19 pandemic, among other global health crises, and has frowned on what he claims are onerous payments made by the US to the agency disproportionate to what other large countries like China, pay.

Established by the UN in 1948, WHO runs a global network of disease surveillance and has set global health policies and priorities in determining research and funding resource allocations. The agency responds to outbreaks of diseases, and smallpox eradication is among its best-known achievements.

These are lost on Trump who has long expressed his desire to yank the US out of the WHO. Because the US is its biggest donor, US withdrawal will be a “lot of funding for WHO to make up for,” says Northeastern University (NU) health sciences and economics professor, Aleksandra Jakubowski.

Sans adequate funds infusion, the WHO budget ($6.8 billion for 2024, 2025, 18 percent of which is contributed by the US) will be substantially cut. “That means we would be much less able to track diseases,” says Jakubowski. “The US will lose its ability to tap into this large surveillance system which is going to diminish its ability to respond to pandemics, for instance.”

For his part, Neil Manar, director of NU’s master of public health program says, “It’s almost impossible to envision a scenario where the US is isolated by the consequences of leaving the WHO.”

“One of the strengths of our global health system is the fact that it is a largely coordinated global public health system and this is because of organizations like the WHO. When you pull out major players like the US from that system it has a ripple effect, with significant impacts on countries globally, including our own,” he said.

Likewise, while not exactly a surprise but still jarring was Trump’s 20 January announcement of the US’s exit from the Paris Agreement, a move which UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said the US, by its rejection of clean energy, would end missing out on lucrative profits, millions of manufacturing jobs and clean air.

To recall, the Paris Agreement was a legally binding treaty addressing climate change adopted by 196 parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France on 12 December 2015 and enforced on 4 November 2016.

Its overarching objective is to prevent an increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to limit temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. That’s because the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that crossing the 1.5°C threshold risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves, rainfall, and the like.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday, 21 January, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Union’s governing European Commission, declared, “Europe will stay the course and continue working with nations that want to protect nature and stop global warming.”

She vowed that the 27-natoin EU-bloc would adhere to the goals of the Paris Agreement which, der Leyen stressed, “continues to be the best hope for all humanity.”

The accord is also regarded by many as a human rights agreement, and Trump’s withdrawal plunks America right amid non-signatories Iran, Libya, and Yemen.

Remarks climate scientist Dr. Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer at the Imperial College’s Centre for Environmental Policy in London, “Trump hasn’t been subtle about his aims to increase injustice and erode fundamental human rights so it is not surprising that he is pulling the US out of the Agreement.”

Among Time’s 100 most influential people in 2021, Otto bewails the US president’s unbridled intent to ramp up fossil fuel production in the US during his second term.

In his inaugural speech, Trump declared, “We have something that no manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth. And we are going to use it, we will drill, baby drill!”

Even China, the world’s worst air polluter, reacted, with the Chinese ‘Foreign Ministry saying US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is “deeply concerning,” and that “climate change is a common challenge facing all of humanity and no country can stay out of it.”

Otto insists that the Paris Agreement’s objectives to move away from fossil fuels and limiting global warming, would truly see a world that is safer, healthier, and more equal.

Many countries in the world, she said, have realized that and are convinced that “these are goals worth fighting for so it is important, more than ever, to tell a narrative different from Trump’s, no matter what he and his government do and say.”