Today, The Geneva Learning Foundation launched a new set of “Teach to Reach Questions” focused on how health workers protect community health during extreme weather events. This initiative comes at a crucial time, as world leaders at COP29 discuss climate change’s mounting impacts on health. As climate change intensifies extreme weather events worldwide, health workers are often the first to respond when disasters strike their communities.
Health workers are already being transformed by climate change. COP29 stakeholders can either support this transformation to strengthen health systems, or risk watching the health workforce collapse under mounting pressures. The World Health Organization’s “COP29 Special Report on Climate Change and Health: Health is the Argument for Climate Action“ highlights the health sector’s role in climate action.
The 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change “reveals the health threats of climate change have reached record-breaking levels” and provides “the most up-to-date assessment of the links between health and climate change”. Yet its treatment of experiential knowledge – particularly the direct observations and understanding developed by frontline health workers and communities – reveals both progress and persistent gaps in
A new article by Andy Haines, Elizabeth Wambui Kimani-Murage, and Anya Gopfert, “Strengthening primary health care in a changing climate,” outlines how climate change is already impacting health systems worldwide, with primary health care (PHC) workers bearing the immediate burden of response. Haines and colleagues make a compelling case for strengthening primary health care (PHC) as a cornerstone of climate-resilient health systems.
A health worker in rural Kenya notices that malaria cases are appearing earlier in the season than usual. A nurse in Bangladesh observes that certain neighborhoods are experiencing more heat-related illnesses despite similar temperatures. These observations often remain trapped in the realm of “anecdotal evidence.”
The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) has created a platform enabling health workers to describe the impacts of climate change on their local communities. Here are ten of the most striking reports. Published on 30 November 2023 on the Gavi #VaccinesWork blog. Written by Ian Jones for Gavi.
We honor everyone who is joining the Special Event “From community to planet: Health professionals on the frontlines of climate change”: health staff from immunization and other areas of health – environmental health and One Health, but also those who fight neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), HIV, and other ailments.