Advocacy tools for health workers
Nurses of the National Diabetes Centre located in Suva, Fiji's capital.
Health workers are consistently among the most trusted professions in countries and communities. As a health professional, you therefore have a powerful and important role to play in using your voice to call for the climate action that will benefit health.
Please feel free to use the ideas and messages on this page to inform your advocacy.
What you can do
Think about who you need to convince to take climate action and what you need them to do – do you need to convince someone to fund solar panels for your health facility, for example, or to tax polluting industries? Come up with some messages designed with this in mind. The key messages and statistics below may help you.
Think about how you could share your messages in a way that would reach your target audience. Some ideas include:
- Opinion pieces or letters to the editor in your local paper
- Emails, calls or in-person visits to local politicians
- A presentation during your next continuing medical education session
- Speak to your friends and followers via a video on your social media account.
Use the power of storytelling to reach people’s hearts, as well as their minds. Talk about the health impacts of climate change that you are seeing among your patients or the great new idea that is making your health facility more climate resilient.
Key messages
The health impacts of climate and environmental change are already being experienced. Yet these health impacts cannot be dealt with by the health sector alone.
Measures that tackle both climate change and health, benefit economies, societies and ecosystems.
The health sector can help other sectors to gain support for climate action.
Together both health and non-health workers can make a difference, resulting in substantial improvements to human health and saving lives.
Statistics
- Promoting more active forms of transport such as walking, cycling and sustainable public transport would mitigate climate change and improve health. Up to 5 million deaths a year could be averted if the global population was more active.
- A food system with health and sustainability at its core could prevent approximately 11 million deaths per year globally, or between 19% to 24% of total adult deaths (1).
- Air pollution kills an estimated seven million people worldwide every year (2).
- Every 14 seconds a person dies from air pollution in the Western Pacific Region.
- Over 90% of people breathe unhealthy levels of outdoor air pollution, largely resulting from the burning of the same fossil fuels that are driving climate change.
- Every year, 2.2 million people in the Western Pacific die from breathing air containing high levels of pollutants both inside and outside of their homes.
- Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress alone.
- Transportation is responsible for 24% of the CO2 emissions from fuel combustion.
- Around one third of the global population – 2.6 billion people – are exposed to harmful levels of household air pollution due to the lack of access to clean cooking solutions, causing millions of deaths annually.
Multimedia
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- Ashkan et al. Health effects of dietary risks in 195 countries, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017. Lancet. 2019; 393(10184):1958-1972. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(19)30041-8.
- Renewable Energy and Jobs – Annual Review 2020. Abu Dhabi: International Renewable Energy Agency; 2010, https://www.irena.org/-/media/files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2020/Sep/IRENA_RE_Jobs_2020.pdf, accessed 21 September 2021).