This publication presents the Agenda for the Americas on Health, Environment, and Climate Change 2021–2030 (the Agenda). The Agenda is a call to action to the
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health sector to lead the charge to address environmental determinants of health in the Americas. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) will work with Member States to achieve its goal and objective to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages using a sustainable and equitable approach that places a priority on reducing health inequity. The Agenda has been developed under the umbrella of the WHO Global Strategy on Health, Environment, and Climate Change, and builds upon the commitments set forth in the Sustainable Health Agenda for the Americas 2018–2030 and the PAHO Strategic Plan 2020–2025. The Agenda was developed in consultation with the Technical Advisory Group and through a consensus-driven decision-making process with Member States during the 2019–2020 period. Looking toward the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 3, the Agenda focuses on: improving the performance of environmental public health programs and institutions; fostering environmentally resilient and sustainable health systems; and promoting environmentally healthy and resilient cities and communities. Its implementation will be context-specific, based on the needs and realities of the countries. It will benefit countries and territories by promoting good governance practices, strengthening the leadership and coordination roles of the health sector, fostering cross-sectoral action, focusing on primary prevention, and enhancing evidence and communication. It will facilitate access to human, technical, and financial resources necessary to address environmental determinants of health and ensure that the Region is fully engaged in global health, environment, and climate change processes and agreements. The objective of the Agenda is to strengthen the capacity of health actors in the health and non-health sectors to address and adapt to environmental determinants of health (EDHs), prioritizing populations living in conditions of vulnerability, in order to meet Outcome 18 of the PAHO Strategic Plan 2020–2025 directly and several other outcomes of the Plan indirectly. To address and adapt to the challenges of EDHs in the Region, an integrated and evidence-informed approach within the health sector and across sectors will be needed, one enabled, and supported by good governance practices, adequate management mechanisms, high-level political will, and adequate human, technical, technological, and financial resources.
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Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2018, 15(12), 2626; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15122626
Climate change is increasing risks to human health and
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to the health systems that seek to protect the safety and well-being of populations. Health authorities require information about current associations between health outcomes and weather or climate, vulnerable populations, projections of future risks and adaptation opportunities in order to reduce exposures, empower individuals to take needed protective actions and build climate-resilient health systems. An increasing number of health authorities from local to national levels seek this information by conducting climate change and health vulnerability and adaptation assessments. While assessments can provide valuable information to plan for climate change impacts, the results of many studies are not helping to build the global evidence-base of knowledge in this area. They are also often not integrated into adaptation decision making, sometimes because the health sector is not involved in climate change policy making processes at the national level. Significant barriers related to data accessibility, a limited number of climate and health models, uncertainty in climate projections, and a lack of funding and expertise, particularly in developing countries, challenge health authority efforts to conduct rigorous assessments and apply the findings. This paper examines the evolution of climate change and health vulnerability and adaptation assessments, including guidance developed for such projects, the number of assessments that have been conducted globally and implementation of the findings to support health adaptation action. Greater capacity building that facilitates assessments from local to national scales will support collaborative efforts to protect health from current climate hazards and future climate change. Health sector officials will benefit from additional resources and partnership opportunities to ensure that evidence about climate change impacts on health is effectively translated into needed actions to build health resilience.
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The Quadripartite Organizations – the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH
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, founded as OIE), and the World Health Organization (WHO) – collaborate to drive the change and transformation required to mitigate the impact of current and future health challenges at the human–animal– plant–environment interface at global, regional and country level.
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The Compendium brings together for the first time key consensus-based policy recommendations and guidance to improve the delivery of proven interventions to women and children. The user-friendly for
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mat incorporates icons and tabs to present key health-related policies that support the delivery of essential RMNCH interventions. It also includes multisectoral policies on the economic, social, technological and environmental factors that influence health outcomes and service delivery. The Policy Compendium is a companion document to the Essential Interventions, Commodities and Guidelines for RMNCH.
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Disease Control Priorities –3rdEdition, Volume 2.
This book focuses on maternal conditions, childhood illness, and malnutrition. Specifically, the chapters address acute illness and undernutritio
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n in children, principally under age 5. It also covers maternal mortality, morbidity, stillbirth, and influences to pregnancy and pre-pregnancy. It also includes the transition to older childhood, in particular, the overlap and commonality with the child development volume
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Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change pp 47–66
This chapter reviews the emerging importance of pollen allergies in relation to ongoing climate change. Allergic diseases have been
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increasing in prevalence over the last decades, partly as the result of the impact of climate change. Increased sensitisation rates and more severe symptoms have been the partial outcome of: increased pollen production of wind-pollinated plants resulting in long-term increased abundance of pollen in the air we breathe; earlier shifts of airborne pollen seasons making occurrence of allergic symptoms harder to predict and deal with efficiently; increased allergenicity of pollen causing more severe health effects in allergic individuals; introduction of new, invasive allergenic plant species causing new sensitisations; environment-environment interactions, such as plants and hosted microorganisms, i.e. fungi and bacteria, which comprise a complex and dynamic system, with additive, presently unforeseeable influences on human health; environment-human interactions, as the consequence of a combination of environmental factors, like air pollution, global warming, urbanisation and microclimatic variability, which create a multi-resolution spatiotemporal system that requires new processing technologies and huge data inflow in order to be thoroughly investigated. We suggest that novel, real-time, personalised pollen information services, like mobile-app risk alerts, must be developed to provide the optimum first line of allergy management.
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Forests, trees and green spaces, hereinafter ‘forests and trees’ for short, provide multiple goods and services that contribute to human
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health. These include medicines, nutritious foods and other non-wood forest products (NWFPs). Globally, at least 3.5 billion people use NWFPs, including medicinal plants, which are particularly important for vulnerable groups and Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs).
During periods of crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for forest products typically increases amongst these groups. Forests and trees also contribute to better health by playing a role in climate change
mitigation and adaptation, contributing to regulating the carbon cycle, but also moderating the micro-climate, filtering pollutants from the air and protecting settlements against the effects of extreme events such as droughts and flash floods.
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The substantial burden of death and disability that results from interpersonal violence, road traffic injuries, unintentional injuries, occupational health risks, air pollution, climate change,
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and inadequate water and sanitation falls disproportionally on low- and middle-income countries. Injury Prevention and Environmental Health addresses the risk factors and presents updated data on the burden, as well as economic analyses of platforms and packages for delivering cost-effective and feasible interventions in these settings. The volume's contributors demonstrate that implementation of a range of prevention strategies-presented in an essential package of interventions and policies-could achieve a convergence in death and disability rates that would avert more than 7.5 million deaths a year
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A Systematic Review, Country Case Studies, and Recommendations for Integration into National Health Systems
Alliance Report
Participation of com
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munity health workers (CHWs) in the provision of primary health care has been experienced all over the world for several decades, and there is an amount of evidence showing that they can add significantly to the efforts of improving the health of the population, particularly in those settings with the highest shortage of motivated and capable health professionals.
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The climate crisis has many consequences – among them widespread health impacts that will lead to immense societal, ecological, and economic harm.
Over the past two decades multiple large-scale r
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eviews on climate change and health have made clear the need for a multi-sectoral approach to target the drivers and impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation. Despite this abundance of scientific evidence underscoring urgency of action, policy implementation responses lag behind. Even at COP26, itself delayed due to an ongoing pandemic, health continues to be considered by many countries a problem independent from climate and environment.
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This report has been prepared in response to informal requests by SIDS Member States and territories for WHO assistance in confronting the stark and dire situation which climate change has created i
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n their countries and the impact it is having on their peoples
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A Reference Guide for Program Managers and Policy Makers. Recently, a renewed interest in large-scale community health worker (CHW) programs has been seen globally. This renewal provides an opportun
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e moment to take stock of issues and challenges such programs face and what can be done to make them as effective as possible. With this in mind, this manual is intended to be used a practical guide for policymakers and program managers wishing to develop or strengthen a CHW program, drawing lessons from other countries that have implemented CHW programs at-scale
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This new publication presents the continuing and emerging challenges to children’s environmental health.
In this version of the compendium, each guidance is coded using the International Classification of Health Interventions (ICHI).
The compendium provides a systematic compilation of published guidance from WHO
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and other UN organizations on health and environment. Guidance on policies and actions as well as awareness raising and capacity building interventions is presented for all major areas of health and environment. Guidance referring to priority settings for action such as cities and other urban settlements, housing, workplaces and health care facilities is also listed. For greater practical relevance, each guidance is classified according to principally involved sectors, level of implementation and instruments for implementation.
The compilation of guidance for each area of health and environment or priority setting for action is accompanied, as available, by information on main sources, exposure assessment and existing guideline values. Important tools and further resources are presented alongside.
This compilation of published guidance on health and environment highlights that a large number of actions across main topics of health and environment, concerning various sectors, and applicable to various levels are available to improve health and reduce environmental risks. This compendium is intended to serve as a repository and easy-to-use and useful resource for decision and policy makers in health and environment at various levels.
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"Some of the problems with our current drug policies stem from the fact that these policies have been largely bifurcated between two different and often contradictory approaches. One treats drug use as a crime that cannot be tolerated
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and should be punished; the other views addiction as a chronic relapsing health or behavioral condition requiring ongoing treatment and support. Neither of these views is all encompassing—it should be recognized that there are patterns of drug use that do not result in significant harm or health problems and therefore require no intervention. The public health approach presented here takes the view that our focus should be on the harm caused by drug use and the harm caused by our policy responses to it. We have focused specifically on illicit drugs, not because they are by themselves more harmful (in fact, tobacco causes more morbidity and mortality than any illicit drug), but because it has become increasingly clear that our current policies to manage illicit drugs are failing."
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The guide to implementing the One Health Joint Plan of Action (OH JPA) at national level provides practical guidance on how countries can adopt and adapt the OH JPA to strengthen
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and support national One Health action.
Building on the OH JPA theory of change, this guide describes three pathways and five key steps to implement the OH JPA at national level:
Pathway 1 -- Governance, policy, legislation, financing and advocacy
Pathway 2 -- Organizational and institutional development, implementation and sectoral integration
Pathway 3 -- Data, evidence, information systems and knowledge exchange.
The stepwise approach comprises:
Situation analysis including stakeholder mapping and review of existing assessment results
Set-up/strengthening of a multisectoral, One Health coordination mechanism
Planning for implementation, including activity prioritization and leveraging of resources
Implementation of national One Health action plans
Review, sharing and incorporation of lessons learned.
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The Regional Action Framework for Noncommunicable Disease Prevention and Control provides a unified vision of objectives and recommended actions to combat the noncommunicable disease (NCD) epi
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demic in the Western Pacific Region. Implementation should be supported by cross-sectoral coordination, sustainable financing, evidence-based policy, and community engagement, tailored to each Member State’s unique context. In doing so, Member States are encouraged to transform a disease treatment-centered “sick system” into a “health system” in which a population’s health and well-being enable socioeconomic development.
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