Housing conditions are directly linked to health and climate risks.
Report informs that Carlos Dora, a representative of the International Society for Urban Health (ISUH), said this at an event titled "Azerbaijan: The Pulse of Healthy Homes," held as part of the 13th session of the World Urban Forum (WUF13) in Baku.
According to him, there are many risks and opportunities related to housing provision and living conditions. These include air pollution caused by the use of polluting fuels, lack of access to green spaces, sustainable transport, blue spaces such as the sea or lakes, or food, as well as the need for insulation and resilience to disasters in the context of climate change.
"Thus, there is a whole set of risks and opportunities related to housing conditions, and if you truly want to benefit the population, you must take all of them into account. It is not useful to have a certain linear way of thinking and to approach the issue through the traditional medical model of ‘you go to the doctor, you go to the pharmacy, you get treated and assessed."
"In addition, when carrying out this kind of intervention, you are not treating a single individual. You are, in fact, treating a community. You are treating the household and all its members, while also taking into account how the intervention affects people living nearby. You know that if there is a polluting fuel inside a home, all your neighbors will be affected by it. For this reason, there is a need to look at this as a group," he said.
"When you look at it as a group, you have the opportunity to make interventions that can combine both benefits and costs or side effects. Thus, your model for looking at interventions in housing conditions is fundamentally different from looking at an intervention focused on an individual.
"Therefore, within this, we need a set of risks, the population affected by them, and then models of change and theories of change that will allow us to understand what causes what and how they are connected to each other. Because if you do not do this, you miss the point and communities have to bear the cost. Thus, we must assess the co-benefits for climate, but at the same time look at what we are missing. Because if you say, 'This intervention is very good, let's do it,' that is not enough. You must look at the scale of interventions and see what the overall benefits are in order to maintain the balance between risks and benefits," Carlos Dora added.