Adaptations of settings approach towards an integrated model of healthy greening in the light of climate change.
By Eloke Onyebuchi
My major objective is to showcase to the world that settings approach as developed
within the health promotion context, is the key technical lead to sustain
global efforts to ‘green’ settings and more effectively link sustainability,
health and place. Settings within the
public health domain is seen as the place or social context, where people in
their everyday activities allow environmental, personal and organizational
factors interact to impact on their health and well being. The 1986 Ottawa
charter informed us that health is lived and created by people within the
settings of their daily life, such as place of learning, work, play, and love.
The settings approach offers us
the opportunity to understand people’s experience in their world, and the
advantage to address their challenges by scaling up interventions that matches
their lived experiences. It also helps us through the invitation of key
stakeholders to address key features like culture, structure and history of
different kinds of setting, as a rationale to create synergy through
coordinated working across settings to effectively promote healthy greening.
The above explanation underscores
the fact that in different settings like hospitals, schools, market/work place,
and prisons, there are multiple momentum around environmental sustainability.
This is because evidence based research indicates that carbon mitigation and
climate change reduction enhances long term public health benefits (Griffiths
et al. 2009), together with the recognition that action related to key issues
like transport and food gives us the opportunity to attain both environmental
and health goals (Adshead 2008, p.1): The health implication of climate change
across the globe have started manifesting, a syndemic approach that offers us
the thunderous opportunity to make a real difference by initiating common
solution to difficult social policy problem. Take obesity for example,
encouraging people through formative campaigns to walk rather than drive their
cars to work will enhance our collective solution on climate change by reducing
carbon emission and also benefit the health of the public.
In the light of the above, I
strongly maintain that working on the settings itself rather than the people in
the setting will be the key technical lead to achieving a healthy greening by
providing us the holistic vision to initiate policies that will promote health
in the light of climate change and enhance a healthy planet. Hence the
rationale to the six frameworks below, designed to create the technical lead
for health planners, evaluators and practitioners on achieving a healthy and
sustainable settings approach.
Framework 1: Building on total ecological perspective.
Taking note of the fact that
health and sustainable development depends on environmental, organisational and
personal factors within the premise that people school, work, and play and live,
the approach will underscore the connectivity and linkages between variable
components, that tends to promote and sustain changes within the setting in
totality. This simply implies introducing health and sustainability in the
daily life, major business and culture of targeted settings, ensuring that
environments where they work, live, play and love manage and sustain health and
sustainability, with the sole aim of improving the well – being of the larger
community. The idea of settings approach here ensures that there is a shift
from limited concentration of single issues to a total concentration of healthy
people and healthy planet.
Framework 2: Start where people are.
This principle ensures that you
do not only engage people but respect their diverse forms of knowledge by
listening to their lived experiences. In the light of complex issue, such as
climate change, it is necessary to start tackling the issue by understanding
the needs and challenges of those people that we seek to mitigate their
problems. This is a truism in community development. Their needs have to be
reflective in the policies for full ownership and easy implementation. The
implementation can take several forms, from tactical focus group dialogue, to
more structured drop-in spaces for informal conversation.
Framework 3: connect practice to setting.
People’s world is often
emotionally tied to the setting or environment in which they learnt everything
they know or have lived their life most. Everyday knowledge is mostly socially
located. Therefore it is very imperative connect practice anchored on place,
culture, history and structure, communicated through policies, agenda and
biographies relating to the settings. Climate change solutions are going to be
easy if we integrate the practice to daily discussions and routines of the
setting in question.
Framework 4: Strengthen the socio – political commitments.
There should be a constructive
dialogue involving the people and the government to move beyond symptoms and
focus more on the root causes of the problem. The interventionist seeking to
green settings need to understand the relevance of the interconnectedness of
lived experiences of one setting to the other and connect to the practice and
structure that create and sustain inequity, domination and exploitation,
including the environmental movement itself. The importance of this framework
is that it provides the rationale to explore the unintended gaps created by the
state and greening practices of the setting.
Framework 5: develop strength and successes.
Building on those practices that
have found value on communities and places, rather than concentrating on groups
with deficit as often seen in the dominant problem – based community
development will be a great step to achieving a healthy greening. The intent is
to encourage interventionist greening setting to adapt approaches and practices
already evident in accomplished settings to build on capacities and successes
of others. This is easily implemented by initiating a commission on climate
change strategies that will oversee the adaptation of strategies in different
settings. This is achievable as those already registered successes in their
setting will be more than glad for a bit of recognition to share supportive
ideas to those struggling in their own setting.
Framework 6: Build the capacity to withstand.
Large cities now have the highest
populations compared to smaller cities around the globe. In a world with
increasing social change, the importance of building resilience cannot be overemphasized. This is demonstrated by the fact that most large cities now have
reduced internal capacity to meet basic amenities, such as clean water,
electricity, food supply in the light of a breakdown of complex supply chains
from severe weather, flooding, environmental degradation and other related
incidences relating to climate change. In the light of the above, the rationale
to re - build resilience – the capacity to withstand, learn or even embrace
change will be highly valuable, rather than allowing our stock of diversity or
resilience to run down because of our pursuit for efficiency and
standardization.
In the light of the climate
change and the thunderous challenges ahead of us, we need to refocus our agenda
and policies to what I simply term “the secret of reversion”. From now to 2030
will see the world going through considerable challenges that requires human
creativity and ingenuity in providing services for adaptation of the most human
transformational transition of our time; the transition from an industrial
growth to a life centered human post – carbon society, a transition that reverts
us from present industrial revolution to the previous agricultural evolution
that came before it. We truly need to embrace the current fact, whether it is
because of the push factor of the climate change or the pull factor of re-localization, it is now crystal clear that re-birthing an emergence of a new
human post – carbon society built on settings approach is perhaps the
healthiest greening project of our modern history.
posted by onyibupet consulting limited @ 19:57
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