Evening Standard Comment: A new approach to the environment and health

 
Evening Standard Comment25 February 2015
WEST END FINAL

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The Prince of Wales’s speech on climate change today addresses a frequently ignored aspect of the problem: human health. The event where he is speaking is co-hosted by the World Health Organisation and the Prince’s International Sustainability Unit and helps identify some of the key issues in advance of the UN’s big COP21 climate change summit in December this year.

The Prince’s point is that we should view tackling climate change as a matter for self-interest in terms of our health as well as an environmental issue. That may be one way of getting politicians to tackle the problem more urgently: while there is broad consensus in Britain about the need for action, it is still not really seen as a top political priority. Yet as the Prince says, “actions which are good for the planet are also good for human health; taking a more active approach to transport by walking and cycling and adopting healthy diets reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also reduce rates of obesity, heart disease, cancer and more — saving lives and money.”

London is a good example of how more environmentally friendly transport systems can improve our health and well-being. The increase in the number of Londoners cycling will have a beneficial effect on their health and also, gradually, on the city’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the congestion charge, and a decent public transport system, make public transport an automatic choice for most Londoners. Cleaner and more efficient buses and taxis, and emissions controls over lorries and buses coming into the capital, are gradually making our air less polluted at the same time as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is the kind of joined-up environmental and transport policy that we need much more of on a national level.

As the Prince points out, we need to deal with environmental policies holistically, by making them seem like sensible self-interest. By making climate change an issue of human health, we can bring about much-needed changes in behaviour that will benefit future generations as well as our own.

More visas, please

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, has urged the leaders of small and medium-sized businesses to bring pressure to bear on the Government to liberalise restrictions on visas that are, he says, restricting business growth. As he pointed out at an Evening Standard Business Connections event in Westminster, filling vacancies for skilled labour is becoming an “increasingly neuralgic issue for business”. In particular, the engineering sector will need an estimated 100,000 more professionals a year over the next decade.

Of course it is desirable that vacancies for skilled jobs should be filled by people from here as well as abroad, and the emphasis on core academic and vocational skills should eventually increase the number of graduates with the qualifications business needs. But in the meantime the economy is growing, and business needs the flexibility to recruit the staff they need now. Liberalising the system for granting visas is in all our interests.

Mature appeal

In an interview with ES magazine, Kirsty Young, 46, observes that Britain needs to learn from the US about utilising the appeal of older women on screen, including TV presenters. She needn’t worry. What with Monica Bellucci, 50, as the new Bond girl and Charlotte Rampling, 69, back on TV in Broadchurch, things have never looked brighter for the older woman.

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