This Working Group focuses on the planetary health pillar of Equity and Social Justice.
The group is currently working to expand the below statement, which summarises the pillar and its relationship with AMR, into a longer policy brief.
This Working Group is open to new members – please email CLIMAR.Network@exeter.ac.uk to join.
A recent European Health Observatory publication on socioeconomic drivers of AMR [1] identified several critical socioeconomic drivers of AMR: gender; living conditions; education level; healthcare access; governance; human mobility; conflict; agriculture and pollution … and, of course, climate change, which already impacts vulnerable populations disproportionately. Just a handful of issues at the intersection of climate change, AMR and social justice include:
• The all-ages mortality from AMR in Sub-Saharan Africa is > twice that of Western Europe.
• ~45% of LMIC healthcare facilities do not have clean, potable water from a tap, despite hygiene playing a major role in infection control and prevention.
• Planetary Health discourse is dominated by Global North voices and conventions, despite evidence of the value of indigenous worldviews in reshaping policy and societal attitudes.[2]
• Neglect of tropical diseases not considered a threat to the Global North (despite growing evidence of vectors ranging further north [3, 4] and the intersection of disease reservoirs in communities living in extreme poverty or homelessness [5] amid otherwise affluent societies with AMR, both create vulnerabilities for AMR emergence and spread.
Nor does only equity between the Global North and Global South, or between the rich and poor within society need to be addressed (more than ever since the removal of much US international aid and WHO funding): so too does equity between human and non-human animals need to be considered. Livestock animals currently kept in unsanitary, overcrowded, poor welfare conditions in which disease flourishes [6], driving up often irrational and poorly regulated antibiotic use, also deserve justice but the One Health field tends to focus more on alternatives to antibiotics that do not address the underlying problem, which requires a transformational shift in dietary practice [7], itself tied to issues of food equity. AMR also has parallels with climate change in terms of transgenerational fairness, with past and current generations producing intractable challenges for future generations through their widespread use across multiple sectors.