When Rohingya refugees arrived in Bangladesh in 2017, their shelters were inadequately ventilated and used plastic sheeting that needed frequent replacement, posing health risks during periods of high heat.
So icddr,b, an international health research center based in Bangladesh, innovated by using Jutin, a plant-derived material that enabled “nature-based housing that is heat-resistant, saline water-resistant,” said Dr. Farjana Jahan, an associate scientist at icddr,b.
Since Bangladesh ranks as the second-largest producer of the fiber comprising Jutin, the organization’s approach offered a smart model for communities seeking to address their unique challenges at the intersection of the environment and human health. “So we are not only reducing the pollution of plastic waste, deforestation,” Jahan explained, “but we are using our local resources to make something sustainable.”
Jahan recounted this experience at last week’s World Health Summit in Berlin during a Rockefeller Foundation-backed session focused on how frontline communities are developing innovative solutions to tackle climate-related health threats and how funders can supercharge these efforts.
The thousands of participants at the conference, which included Bill Gates, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, exchanged insights on the most pressing contemporary health issues, including the importance of strong community engagement to advance investments in tackling climate-health problems.
“One thing that we’ve seen in Bangladesh is that one shelter — one cyclone shelter — was constructed on the wrong side of the river,” explained Vanina Laurent-Ledru, director general of Foundation S – the Sanofi Collective. “When the cyclone hit, the community could not cross the river mostly because the local community had not been consulted. So that’s the type of adaptation opportunities that we are missing if you are not doing work right with the communities.”
Collaborating closely with communities on the ground to confront the health impacts of climate change is critical everywhere from a tropical monsoon area like Bangladesh to a tropical rainforest like the Amazon.
For example, the water level of a large Amazon River tributary recently sunk to a 122-year nadir, complicating the traditional ways of life for indigenous communities. “People are usually used to and adapted to living with flooding in Amazon but not with extreme drought,” shared Daniel Aristizábal, regional head for the Amazon at the Amazon Conservation Team.
As a result, climate change is disrupting the “ecological calendar” that inhabitants of the region rely on, fueling food insecurity and “a whole set of psychological effects” that have been gleaned from conversations with indigenous people, Aristizábal explained.
Involving indigenous communities in solutions to these health problems arising from climate change is a synergistic process. “It’s not about learning from indigenous people, but now it’s about learning with because the factors are new,” Aristizábal said. “So this traditional knowledge needs to work together with health practitioners, with government officials, with NGO sectors, with the academia to create a new knowledge that adapts to the forest and the changing forest.”
Importantly, this synergistic knowledge exchange can be upscaled in the digital age, enabling local insights on climate-health impacts to become globally applicable.
“I think it’s incredibly important that we, first of all, speak the same language, and in this space of the effects of climate on health, data and the digital infrastructure is the language,” said Dr. Gabriel Leung, executive director of the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust. Leung emphasized the need to “converge on the data architecture and requirements so that we all are talking about the same things and measuring similarly so that we can all get to the same place that we are now starting to agree on.”
Through dialogue highlighting climate-health interventions that have worked, this year’s World Health Summit laid important groundwork for doing just that.
*Note: The author moderated one of the World Health Summit’s climate-health panels that this article references.*
