Recap — Commercial Determinants of Health and the Right to Health: Insights from Fossil Fuel Accountability Work, with Marta Schaaf

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Published on April 24, 2025

On March 26, 2025, Marta Schaaf, Director of the Programme on Climate, Economic and Social Justice and Corporate Accountability at Amnesty International, delivered a seminar exploring how a public health framework, specifically the commercial determinants of health (CDOH) can inform human rights work with a focus on fossil fuels.

Schaaf explained that corporate actors not only produce harmful commodities like tobacco, ultra processed foods and fossil fuels, but also actively shape the policy environment to protect their interests. Drawing from the CDOH framework she highlighted how corporations externalize health and environmental costs, influence scientific narratives and exploit policy tools such as trade agreements and cost benefit analysis to avoid regulation. These efforts often undermine state obligations to uphold the right to health.

Additionally, she detailed how fossil fuel companies evolved their tactics, from denial of climate change to promoting themselves as problem solvers through “solutions” like carbon capture, while continuing harmful extraction practices. Importantly she revealed that the widely recognized “carbon footprint” concept was developed by a Public Relations firm for British Petroleum, shifting responsibility to individuals instead of systems.

Schaaf emphasized the role of civil and political rights in safeguarding the civic space for environmental defenders particularly Indigenous communities and frontline populations. She outlined Amnesty’s strategy of using mixed methods research including satellite data and testimonies to document the human rights impacts of fossil fuel extraction. These findings aim to support transnational solidarity and challenge corporate power structures.

She concluded by encouraging public health professionals to critically engage with the growing influence of corporate actors and recognize the structural and discursive tools they employ. The seminar underscored the urgency of integrating public health and human rights approaches to confront the harms perpetuated by commercial interests and to protect vulnerable communities and ecosystems.

Connect With Marta Schaaf.

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