On Health Day on the COP28 climate conference within the United Arab Emirates, 124 countries endorsed the COP28 UAE Climate and Health Declaration, which commits to placing well being on the heart of local weather motion. Yet simply outdoors the convention venue, migrant employees are uncovered to health harms related to escalating results of local weather change and fossil fuels, together with excessive heat and air pollution, with out sufficient protections.

The new declaration’s emphasis on the “need to combat inequalities within and among countries and pursuing policies that work towards achievement of sustainable development goals” rings hole for thousands and thousands of migrant employees within the UAE, who make up 88 % of the inhabitants, and their households again residence.

Human Rights Watch has lately documented how UAE authorities are externalizing local weather dangers to migrant employees, who’re disproportionately uncovered to excessive warmth and lack sufficient safety, by sending chronically unwell employees residence with out treatment. This shifts the care burden to overstretched healthcare techniques in migrant origin nations like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal which might be themselves on the entrance strains of local weather catastrophes regardless of being negligible emitters of greenhouse fuel emissions.

The declaration fails to handle fossil fuels as the primary supply of greenhouse fuel emissions driving local weather change and contributing to well being harms, together with air air pollution. Human Rights Watch has shown that poisonous air fed by fossil fuels is placing folks within the UAE in danger. One employee described the UAE as a “factory that produces patients” as there are “very few people who leave here with a healthy body.”

The declaration notes the significance of “strengthening trans- and inter-disciplinary research” and “partnerships with populations most vulnerable to the health impacts.” However, UAE authorities severely restrict nongovernmental teams, ban commerce unions, and have a zero tolerance coverage for dissent, making it even more durable for migrant employees to hunt structural reforms. The authorities’s opacity round health data hampers analysis for evidence-based policymaking, and lecturers and journalists are inclined to self-censor to keep away from reprisals.

The COP28 UAE Climate and Health Declaration reveals the broad chasm between the convention hosts’ portrayal of the nation as a frontrunner in well being and local weather motion, and the well being harms, together with these linked to fossil fuels, from which it fails to guard its personal residents.