Opinion | Say hello to the new trio of dangers that threatens the world: obesity, undernutrition and climate change

As if there were not enough plagues and pestilences looming over humankind, we have now been introduced to the mother of all threats – the Great Global Syndemic – which will undoubtedly soon be reduced to the neat acronym GGS.

The once-fusty British medical journal The Lancet, joining forces in a “Lancet Commission” with the University of Auckland, the World Obesity organisation, and the Milken Institute School of Public Health, has just released an awesome but virtually unreadable expose on the Great Global Syndemic – the grave combination of the epidemics of obesity, undernutrition and climate change that now looms over us.

While I am certain the 44 commissioners who authored the Syndemic report are wholly right to throw a spotlight on the crisis, and call for urgent action, I confess I have found the small print of life insurance policies easier to read.

It reminded me of the recent shocking report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which probably accurately warned us that we have just 12 years to take serious steps to curb CO2 emissions, but then blinded us with so much obscure and academically caveated science that most political leaders will almost certainly have flopped back into policy inertia.

The Lancet report boggles us with horrid language like “obesogenic” and “consumptogenic”, and presents us with governance challenges that “are contextualised against a backdrop of contemporary changes in global, national and local governance systems”. It then rallies to action around six principles, nine recommendations, four essential strategies, and 20 actions – and I confess that by now I have forgotten every single one of them. If the GGS really is a crisis, we need a much crisper way of getting our adrenaline running.