Low Carbon Healthy Lifestyles – Transdisciplinary work?

Continued from my previous blog article

 

Working towards a shared goal, i.e. healthy lifestyle and sustainability, could be described as ‘transdisciplinary’ work. This way of working or researching is often overlooked, because expertise and ‘knowledge’ tend to develop within specialties; in this case, public health and environmental science. Unfortunately disciplines have their drawbacks; research may miss opportunities of ‘cross-fertilisation’ as exemplified by the newspaper article mentioned in my previous blog. Furthermore putting knowledge into practice may be hindered because lifestyles are not arranged in disciplines – we need messages that talk to different facets of our daily life at once. I am involved in an international project that will look at the benefits of transdisciplinary research for human development and sustainability science:

“How can we better connect social and environmental sciences to enhance the well-being of people and their environments, especially in the context of poverty?”

http://www.wun.ac.uk/research/bridging-health-promotion-and-sustainability-science-transition-green-economy

A challenge for working in a transdisciplinary way can be terminology - because it is mix of several disciplines titles tend to be long and complicated. Also different disciplines may have different meanings for key terms, therefore some meaning can get 'lost in translation'. How do people talk about these links between health and global climate change? We invented the term ‘Low Carbon Healthy Lifestyles’. Twitter users organise around hashtags, which can be an important seed crystal to grow interest and debate. This is the best I’ve found so far: #climatehealth

A great case study of these overlapping issues are the community projects funded by Natural Choices for Health and Wellbeing (Liverpool Primary Care Trust NHS in partnership with Mersey Forest). See my previous blog article.

http://www.merseyforest.org.uk/our-work/natural-choices-for-health-and-wellbeing/

http://www.projectdirt.com/project/8669/

I have been researching the impact of one of these projects; a therapeutic horticulture project for children. Children and young people from 3 local schools participated in the project, learning about the natural environment as well as benefitting their own wellbeing. I am currently studying how children perceive the gardening project and how they felt it affected their wellbeing. I am particularly interested in how their concepts of nature, ecosystem or sustainability may influence their perceptions of the social world. Are the words and concepts used by the horticultural therapists a critical factor, or is simply being in greenspace therapeutic?

There are ways that tackling climate change can benefit health and wellbeing, however these are often not made explicit. People often consider one or the other, maybe because both health and sustainability are complex topics. I believe bringing these two together, either within global research or local community activities, is a great way to build momentum.

 

Low Carbon Healthy Lifestyles: Goals and challenges shared between health promotion and environmental sustainability.

 The science behind the association between health and climate change is building and becoming mainstream. A few years ago a mini-series within the Lancet was dedicated to these issues (Haines et al., 2009). Prof Anthony McMichael, in his recent review (McMichael, 2013), outlines a concept that human-induced change on a global scale has many risks for health of the world’s population. Climate change is one of several examples of these global changes, others being; epidemics of new strains of influenza virus, a decline in seafood stocks, shortages of fresh water and food security (McMichael, 2013).

From a much more local perspective, in the UK, West Midlands Public Health Observatory have calculated the health impacts on the population of the West Midlands of weather events from projected climate change until the end of the century (May, Baiardi, Kara, Raichand, & Eshareturi, 2010). For the Northwest of England, we looked at this from a different angle; looking at disciplines in health (eg. respiratory, cardiovascular, mental wellbeing) and how these may be affected by climate change events (Bates, Chadborn, Jones, & McVeigh, 2011). Partly, the aim of arranging these impacts around the health issue, rather than the climate event, was to gain interest of health professionals and get information across to them.

Sustainable health leaders are emphasising the co-benefits to health of taking action on climate change (mitigation). Cycling rather than driving the car to the shops improves fitness and decreases carbon-footprint. Growing your own vegetables may improve diet and may improve mental wellbeing through time in greenspace; also it can reduce foodmiles and carbon footprint of fertilisers.

A recent newspaper article described how sustainability could learn vital lessons from the experience of health promotion over the years:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/communicating-sustainability-behaviour-change-public-health?CMP=twt_gu

Steven Johnson makes a key point; that health promotion has learnt to focus on inequality. Without this focus, well-meaning interventions can exacerbate inequality; the better-off are more able to take advantage of the campaign, and thus improve their health. This is an argument against mass messages, eg TV adverts. Thus advocacy is best at the local level, aiming to reach those suffering from the worst of austerity measures and indifferent consumerism.

Community-based activities are suited to the local context and may be the best way of promoting health and sustainability. I have been studying children’s views of health and climate change using examples of activities that give co-benefits – we coined the term ‘Low Carbon Healthy Lifestyles’(Neil Chadborn, Springett, Gavin, & Dewar, 2011). Young children are often enthusiastic about activities such as cycling and growing vegetables, and show some awareness of the benefits to both health and the environment (NH Chadborn, Gavin, Springett, & Robinson, 2012). Many local organisations facilitate these projects, but often promote either health or environmental benefits. I propose that making explicit links between health and climate change may be beneficial to engaging the public with these activities. Also the shared agenda may strengthen networking between organisations and with schools. I’ll continue this topic in my next blog article.

In this blog I have shown how climate change and health are inextricably linked. While these are global issues, and there is a place for international legislation, we can all take action in our own communities. I believe it’s useful to communicate this explicitly by using phrases such as ‘Low Carbon Healthy Lifestyles’. 

Bates, G., Chadborn, N., Jones, L., & McVeigh, J. (2011). Impact of climate change upon health and health inequalities in the north west of England. Liverpool.

Chadborn, Neil, Springett, J., Gavin, N., & Dewar, S. (2011). Promoting Low Carbon Healthy Lifestyles as new opportunities to tackle obesity and health inequalities. Liverpool.

Chadborn, NH, Gavin, N., Springett, J., & Robinson, J. (2012). “Cycling–exercise or trying to stop pollution”: methods to explore children’s agency in health and climate change. Local Environment, 18(3), 271–288.

Haines, A., McMichael, A. J., Smith, K. R., Roberts, I., Woodcock, J., Markandya, A., Armstrong, B. G., et al. (2009). Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: overview and implications for policy makers. Lancet, 374(9707), 2104–14. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61759-1

May, E., Baiardi, L., Kara, E., Raichand, S., & Eshareturi, C. (2010). Health Effects of Climate Change in the West Midlands: Technical Report. Birmingham.

McMichael, A. J. (2013). Globalization, Climate Change, and Human Health. New England Journal of Medicine, 368, 1335–43.

Community projects: Natural Choices for Health and Wellbeing

I’ve been involved with Natural Choices for Health and Wellbeing from the beginning of the programme a couple of years ago (on and off), but have now moved out of the region. So it was great to catch up with friends at a meeting summing up the findings of the programme evaluation.

Following a great lunch at Blackburne house, Andy Hull kicked off the meeting , by encouraging us to think of evaluation as a celebration rather than dry figures and graphs! Clare Olver and Sarah Dewar, who have been running the programme, gave an overview of just how many community groups had been involved and what they’d all been up to. Here’s the numbers: 3274 participants, 100 partners, 84 events, 1159 workshops, 867 volunteers, 135 employed, all from a total £300k funding! Wow how did everyone find the time and energy! And this was the key point that Sarah and Clare emphasised – none of this great work would have happened without all the community organisations and volunteers commitment – so Well Done!

And this is the important bit – to keep on meeting together to support each other in continuing the great projects and partnerships.

As well as numbers the programme has collected a huge amount of stories and pictures – from the shortest of comments:  one of the participants felt amazing swinging off a branch of a tree! (forest school project). Looking at the ‘bigger picture’, the collection of stories and feedback really reinforces our understanding of the ‘Five Ways to Wellbeing’, for examples, for Take Notice ‘the location provides a safe haven’, for Give: ‘Community members now volunteering to help sustain the environment’, for ‘Be Active’ – well there were just too many comments to count!

The invited speaker was Dr William Bird MBE who gave a great presentation on how physical activity can extend our lifespan! In his view, obesity is not the priority, it’s being sedentary and being stressed that we have to avoid. Even just walking at a moderate pace, several times a week can improve our health and help prevent disease. If we do this in a park or greenspace, then this is also likely to reduce our stress  - which again helps prevent physical and mental health problems. Indeed William made the point that stress and lack of physical activity can feed each other in a vicious circle, but community activities such as Natural Choices for Health and Wellbeing, can help break this circle. He thinks of chronic stress within 3 categories; People, Place and Purpose. These concepts are really just like the ‘Five Ways to Wellbeing’. 

Finally William emphasised how community organisations could use evidence about what can improve health and wellbeing to give weight to funding applications for future community projects. This is where the evaluation from Natural Choices will help – showing that these projects had benefits for the people of Liverpool is a great way of suggesting that more investment should go to these type of projects to enable even more people to get involved.