Scaling Up Health Adaptation Measures to Meet the Climate Change Challenge in the Americas

Climate change poses an unprecedented challenge to the health sector. Across all roles and contexts, teams are tasked with responding to novel, intensified, and cascading climate impacts urgently and effectively while also investing in low carbon, resilient operations. While many know that reactive and incremental adaptation will not be sufficient to avoid severe health impacts, particularly in low resourced and remote settings, existing pressures on staff and services in many jurisdictions make it difficult to move beyond pilot projects and piecemeal solutions. However, as increasingly destructive wildfire and hurricane seasons have demonstrated: adaptation action itself is insufficient if it is not rapidly scaled-up from local to national levels through deep coordination involving key decision makers in- and outside of the health sector. The goal of this 11-session course is to equip health professionals, federal, regional and local health systems planners, hospital administrators, emergency planners, sustainability officers, public health officials, and others with the knowledge and tools needed to rapidly scale-up* adaptation, mitigation, and resilience efforts to prepare health systems for climate change.

*Scaling-up health adaptation means developing and implementing needed measures faster and more widely geographically and among at risk populations.