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NET-ZERO POLICIES targeting the climate crisis will have the added benefit of saving lives by improving public health, a new study in the UK has shown.
Significant health benefits would come alongside policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation, transport, home energy, travel and food, according to the research published in the Lancet Journal.
In particular, it found that retrofitting homes with insulation – which serves to reduce energy consumption and therefore emissions – is the single largest contributor to health benefits of net-zero policies.
Switching to renewable energy to power homes and reducing red meat consumption are the next most impactful factors.
The team of researchers modelled how certain policies will affect health in areas such as reduced air pollution, healthier diets, and increased exercise and measured the collective number of additional years that people would live in England and Wales.
Under modelling of policies that led to a 60% reduction in emissions by 2035, retrofitting homes with insulation resulted in a total of 836,000 extra years of life by 2050, followed by 657,000 extra years through switching to renewable energy to power homes.
Reducing red meat consumption gave an extra 412,000 years, replacing car journeys with walking or cycling yielded 125,000, and adopting renewable energy for electricity generation resulted in another 46,000.
Switching to renewable energy for transport led to an extra 30,000 years of life, giving a total of two million years across the policies.
Additionally, a second modelled scenario where consumer behaviour changed quickly with regards to diet and travel choices amounted to two and a half million years.
Dr James Milner of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said the modelling confirms that there are “significant health benefits to implementing net zero policies”.
“Not only are these policies essential for mitigating climate change, they also make us healthier,” he said.
If we move faster in adopting more environmentally friendly diets and active ways of travelling, the health benefits will be even greater.
Dr Milner described the role of retrofitting homes with insulation in delivering health benefits as “particularly striking”.
“Housing in England and Wales is poorly insulated compared to other countries, so actions taken towards improving home energy efficiency prove particularly beneficial to reducing carbon emissions and improving health,” he said.
“The energy and cost-of-living crises this winter have provided a long list of reasons for the UK to adopt an ambitious insulation policy; our study adds better health to that list.”
Ireland’s Climate Action Plan references co-benefits of climate action such as improved public health, better resilience against extreme weather events, and new jobs in emerging industries.
In 2015, the Paris Agreement called for countries to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees and not to allow it to surpass 2 degrees.
Currently, the world is around 1.1 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times and is already experiencing impacts of the climate crisis such as heatwaves, droughts and melting ice sheets.
Global surface temperatures are expected to exceed 1.5 and 2 degrees unless “deep reductions” are made to emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
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Retrofitting is only available to the people with plenty of cash . Same as most other benefits .
All I read in the above article is that we need to lower our living standards drastically. I do not trust anyone who tells me we need to eat less meat and then replace it with processed crap.
@An Drew Bearla: Yes, all that came out of the big meeting in Davos is that we must stop eating meat and dairy or the world will starve, and we must share our cars or cycle or walk, all the mullarkey Ryan is spouting and all from a bunch that then sat down to a four course meat laden lunch after flying in on 1500 private jets. The narrative to blame the ordinary consumer and deflect away from their lavish carbon laden lifestyles is ridiculous. Animal farm springs to mind
Will do this, will improve that. All talk and no action. The government has no motivation to implement any of these policies. Still using diesel commuter trains ffs.
@Tomo: We are making progress faster than ever before. I would live to speed it up too, but denial of what’s happening is nor helpful.
Bottom line is what comes out of our chimneys and out of the vehicle tailpipes isn’t good for us and has resulted in worse health for our population and more deaths. Even if you think climate change isn’t real (it is) then only a fool would continue to not tackle us poisoning ourselves.
@Barry Somers: a few more new taxes will sort everything.
That’s the problem, the greens solution is to tax the problem with no alternative. Of course, people are turning against it
@Jim Buckley Barrett: Not true.
@Nicholas McMurry: Yes it is true. Tax tax tax from a fella that knows about as much about climate change as my 8yr old. All the solutions Eamo is pushing for at present are financially or infrastructurally unviable like hydrogen which is inhibitively expensive to make or offshore wind which we have no way due to planning restrictions and lack of infrastructure make, but which are the chief objectives of E3G which ol Eamo is/was a senior associate of, as usual the self serving bull we have gotten used to in Irish politics. Any man that signs off on tax incentives for fuel for private jets and the writing off of carbon footprint for such is not green. No viable alternatives for anything, no reduction in our carbon footprint despite all the waffle, lying about our agricultural footprint throwing our farmers and food producers under a bus because they are a soft target while letting big corporations off the hook by giving them all our carbon credits from our grasslands, hedgegrows and forestry. Ireland is not one of the worst polluters as we are so often told to justify taxing the life out of us we just fall foul of the carbon credit rules that the large industrial countries set up to make themselves look far better than they really are, America, Germany France etc
@Nicholas McMurry: of course its true, if the government and greens in particular wanted to actually do something that wasn’t a punitive tax measure, it would be a shock.
Insulation is the most effective measure, yet they persist in making the retrofitting policy, part of the convoluted seai scheme which requires “trained” certified installers, when homeowners could, depending on their current skills learn to install it just as effectively themselves, by watching a few instructional videos, just like the “trained” installers did…
Subsidising insulation for domestic projects with a zero vat rate, would encourage more people to retrofit insulation to their homes themselves, reducing the amount of heating from all sources, along with particulate and carbon emissions across the board.
Better put the old age pension up. Where will all the food come from? More homes will be needed.
Anyone find those TRVs (main image) a complete waste of time?
I find that after a year the da*n thing is stuck on full heat. (I’ve checked the pin underneath and it seems to move freely) Was this just another way for the plumbers to make a few bucks :) ?
So, if we live in England or Wales and insulate our homes we could live for 836,000 years. I don’t want to live that long.
Why does an article in an Irish publication write about a foreign country without stipulating that it is a study done in that foreign country?
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