Catalyzing Action for Health in a Changing Climate
Who we are
The Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health & Sustainable Care began its first year of operation on November 1, 2023, having been established as an ‘Extra-Departmental Unit Type C’ by its four founding faculties: Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Temerty Faculty of Medicine, Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, and Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy.
The Collaborative Centre was launched in recognition of the need for a centre of excellence to catalyze climate & sustainability action for health & health systems through research, education, and practice & policy change.
Our first year
In our first year of operations, we developed our inaugural Strategic Plan (2023-2028). We did that by engaging – and building – our community of members and partners across the 3 UofT campuses, the health science network, and beyond.
In our first year of operations, we also started to deliver on our priorities. In this report, we highlight our successes and the work still before us. We invite you to do this work with us.
- We worked to build our community engaging >120 people in strategic planning & >1,000 people in events, including our inaugural day-long Symposium, launching our website, newsletter, and seminar series.
- We worked to shape the future of climate, environment & sustainability research in the health sciences, by funding 5 Seed Grants with 4 partners, and launching 4 Research Clusters on priority issues where member expertise is concentrated, catalyzing novel, interdisciplinary collaborations.
- We worked to equip learners to understand and act on the health and health system challenges of climate & environmental change, enrolling the inaugural cohort of 19 research trainees from 7 faculties in our newly launched Climate, Health & Sustainable Care Student Training program, and engaging 108 professionals-in-practice from 8 provinces in a new national ECHO training program on Climate, Health & Sustainable Care, launched in collaboration with CASCADES.
- We worked to activate practice & policy change to promote health & health system sustainability, strengthening the Toronto Academic Health Science Network “Sustainable Health System Community of Practice,” through a collaborative performance monitoring and benchmarking framework, and empowering pan-Canadian climate action and awareness in healthcare through CASCADES, with funding from Environment and Climate Change Canada.