Center for Climate Change and Health
The Center for Climate Change and Health contributes to building healthy and climate-resilient communities that have the right tools to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The Center engages local leaders, community-based organizations, public health and health care workers, scientists, policymakers and civil society in mainstreaming the protection of health across a wide range of policies and sectors. It promotes strategies that effectively address the impacts of climate change on health, while at the same time generating co-benefits from adaptation and mitigation for health and across other sectors.
Projects
Active Projects
- Creating a Climate for Health
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This project's goals are to foster public health sector engagement and partnerships to mitigate climate change and to build community and public health system resilience to adapt to climate change. The project is developing an organizing framework for public health worker engagement; implementing pilot projects that model community climate action; and developing targeted climate communications and advocacy support for the public health sector.
- U.S. Climate and Health Alliance
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PHI's Center for Climate Change and Health hosts the U.S. Climate and Health Alliance, which brings together public health and health care workers from across the U.S. to amplify the health voice on what The Lancet has called "the biggest global health threat of the 21st century." Alliance members will come together to share information, identify ways to engage and work to ensure that health and health equity are at the forefront of all U.S. programs and policies to address climate change.
- Cleaner Cookstoves: Building Global Capacity and Improving Public Health
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One-third of the world’s population, three billion people, depend on wood, charcoal and other biomass fuels for cooking. The World Health Organization has estimated that pollution from cooking fires causes over four million premature deaths per year, mostly among women and young children. Household air pollution causes acute respiratory infections, lung cancer and heart disease, among other serious illnesses. More people die each year from cooking smoke than from malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS combined. The urgency to transition billions of people to cleaner cooking is enormous.
PHI is tackling this challenge through a range of activities funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cookstove program evaluation, technical capacity-building and partnerships with organizations on the ground are just a few of PHI’s interventions to reduce mortality from household pollution. The program supports field work in Guatemala, India and other low-income countries and supports the efforts of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
- Changing the Narrative on Climate and Health
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This project builds on the work of the Global Climate and Health Forum, working to garner support for a California-specific Call for Action on Climate, Health, and Equity and to distribute the Call to California electeds and officials.
Completed Projects
- Climate Change, Health and Equity: Framework to Action
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Using a Center-developed framework on the intersections among climate change, health and health equity as a guide, this project seeks to: catalyze and support health sector engagement on climate change and integration of health and equity into climate action, through advocacy, training, and support. The Center is supporting a national learning collaborative for urban local health departments to integrate climate change into the work of LHDs.
- Climate Change and Health: Building Capacity and Leveraging the Health Voice
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The goal of this project is to train physicians affiliated with the California Medical Association Foundation's Network of Ethnic Physicians Organizations (NEPO) on the basics of climate change, health, and equity; support them to conduct education and outreach on climate change and health for colleagues, community organizations, media, and policy-makers.
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