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.