'With climate action, India can save its children’s health'

Gaurab Basu, MD, MPH, teaches at Harvard Medical School. Sharing his insights with Times Evoke, he discusses climate impacts on children’s well-being:



I am a physician committed to health equity. As a primary care doctor, I’ve seen how broader systemic and structural forces impact my patients’ health. Along with the US, I’ve worked in rural India and Liberia and found that for children in particular to be healthy, we have to focus on the intersections of equity, justice and climate change now.

Climate has significant health impacts — it can alter child health even before a child is born. A study in 2020 showed heat and air pollution can increase premature births which are associated with multiple childhood health issues. Air pollution can also significantly impact cognitive development in children and generate respiratory diseases like asthma.



With its effects on heat and moisture, climate change is also driving vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue which affect children. Further, child nutrition is being reshaped by climate impacts on food and water while extreme weather has already displaced millions, disrupting their children’s lives. Multiple studies thus show us the anxiety children feel about climate change. Equity is deeply interwoven into such concerns. When climate change bears down, the disempowered are hardest hit.

In India, poor communities living in coastal areas face great vulnerability to cyclones. In the US, the areas to flood first are often the poorest. Wealthy people can move but the poor are left in such situations. When extreme weather hits, their children, and particularly girl children, lose their education, nutrition and security. Climate change is thus aggravating existing injustices and seeding new ones. Pollution plays out similarly — in the US, children in poorer communities are disproportionately exposed to air pollution.



Fossil fuel infrastructure like coal plants are placed more in poorer communities — thus, these children are heavily exposed. India is home to 32 of the world’s 40 most polluted cities but while wealthier households can buy air purifiers and stay indoors, poorer households and their children simply cannot. I began working on women and children’s health with the Child in Need Institute (CINI) in India in 2009.



When Cyclone Amphan impacted coastal Bengal in 2020, it upended decades of CINI work on improving the nutrition and education of less privileged children who will now bear long-term consequences. This troubles me deeply. I became a doctor to be part of a world where we can take care of each other. We should be able to see the humanity and dignity in every person and develop systems that allow everyone to have good health. But many of our current systems are deepening climate and health disparities.

Climate action is a profound way to protect children’s health. A Harvard School of Public Health study found that the health benefits of climate action in India are actually significantly higher than other places — a solar panel or a wind turbine in India can save 30 times more lives because by using renewable energy, you reduce associated pollution impacts right away. Our children cannot be healthy without our planet being healthy.


Doctors should take up advocacy to reduce fossil fuels for public health — we cannot continue fossil fuelled-lifestyles oblivious to their impacts, particularly on children. This consciousness is growing among people now but it must play out in policy, such as the global community delivering climate finance. As a doctor, my advocacy is centred on creating policies that allow people to have good health from when they are a child. This is even more critical as the world’s children face a climate crisis now.