Integrating Climate Change Adaptation into Public Health Practice: Using Adaptive Management to Increase Adaptive Capacity and Build Resilience

Abstract

Background: Climate change is expected to have a range of health impacts, some of which are already apparent. Public health adaptation is imperative, but there has been little discussion of how to increase adaptive capacity and resilience in public health systems.Objectives: We explored possible explanations for the lack of work on adaptive capacity, outline climate–health challenges that may lie outside public health’s coping range, and consider changes in practice that could increase public health’s adaptive capacity.Methods: We conducted a substantive, interdisciplinary literature review focused on climate change adaptation in public health, social learning, and management of socioeconomic systems exhibiting dynamic complexity.Discussion: There are two competing views of how public health should engage climate change adaptation. Perspectives differ on whether climate change will primarily amplify existing hazards, requiring enhancement of existing public health functions, or present categorically distinct threats requiring innovative management strategies. In some contexts, distinctly climate-sensitive health threats may overwhelm public health’s adaptive capacity. Addressing these threats will require increased emphasis on institutional learning, innovative management strategies, and new and improved tools. Adaptive management, an iterative framework that embraces uncertainty, uses modeling, and integrates learning, may be a useful approach. We illustrate its application to extreme heat in an urban setting.Conclusions: Increasing public health capacity will be necessary for certain climate–health threats. Focusing efforts to increase adaptive capacity in specific areas, promoting institutional learning, embracing adaptive management, and developing tools to facilitate these processes are important priorities and can improve the resilience of local public health systems to climate change.

Towards a threshold climate for emergency lower respiratory hospital admissions

“…Such an alert system will help hospital and healthcare managers planning necessary precautionary measures during extreme climate events (Dolney and Sheridan, 2006;Fouillet et al, 2007;McGeehin and Mirabelli, 2001;Tan et al, 2007). The implications of climate variability will vary according to geographical latitudes, disease categories, socio-economic and population characteristics (Hess et al, 2012;WHO, 2008). So such health alert system would be more efficient if it is location specific and targets homogenous population.…”

Seafood insecurity, bush meat consumption, and public health emergency in West Africa: Did we miss the early warning signs of an Ebola epidemic?

“…Adapting to food or climate related disasters also have an institutional dimension in terms of decision support tools that are intricately connected to multi-level governance arrangements (Kooiman et al 2005, Armitage andPlummer 2010). These arrangements provide opportunity for linking risk reduction measures in public health with capacity building efforts in promoting well-being (Hess et al 2012).…”

Ecohealth and Resilience Thinking: A Dialog from Experiences in Research and Practice

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