Third People's Health Assembly: Health and the environment from environmental justice to climate change

The Third People's Health Assembly (PHA3) will be held in July 2012 in Cape Town, South Africa. The purpose of this session will be to share challenges and strategies for addressing critical environmental health issues discussed at the Assembly. Environmental Justice (EJ) communities exist around the world, but are poorly linked and rarely coordinate advocacy efforts. EJ communities often suffer multiple burdens of toxic exposure as well as community degradation and local social determinants of health (SDH), which create a vicious cycle of downslide. However, EJ communities rarely incorporate a focus on SDH, and science is only beginning to try to explain the cumulative impact of multiple toxic exposures. Some communities get so little political response to massive cumulative burdens that they appear to be “sacrifice zones.” While climate change has a more global and less acutely local impact than environmental justice, the emerging global climate change network often fails to connect with social justice movements, and advocacy networks have yet to emerge that explicitly connect the emissions occurring in EJ communities with the broader U.S. contribution to climate change. The PHA3 will include an explicit focus on strengthening communication and solidarity among groups in different countries which can greatly strengthen political power to address environmental justice and climate change in tandem. This presentation will tie into other panel presentations related to the PHA3.