Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.
Women's Health Research Institute, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Front Public Health. 2024 Mar 12;12:1309186. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1309186. eCollection 2024.
Climate change is an environmental crisis, a health crisis, a socio-political and an economic crisis that illuminates the ways in which our human-environment relationships are arriving at crucial tipping points. Through these relational axes, social structures, and institutional practices, patterns of inequity are produced, wherein climate change disproportionately impacts several priority populations, including rural and remote communities. To make evidence-based change, it is important that engagements with climate change are informed by data that convey the nuance of various living realities and forms of knowledge; decisions are rooted in the social, structural, and ecological determinants of health; and an intersectional lens informs the research to action cycle. Our team applied theory- and equity-driven conceptualizations of data to our work with the community on Cortes Island-a remote island in the northern end of the Salish Sea in British Columbia, Canada-to aid their climate change adaptation and mitigation planning. This work was completed in five iterative stages which were informed by community-identified needs and preferences, including: An environmental scan, informal scoping interviews, attending a community forum, a scoping review, and co-development of questions for a community survey to guide the development of the Island's climate change adaptation and mitigation plan. Through this community-led collaboration we learned about the importance of ground truthing data inaccuracies and quantitative data gaps through community consultation; shifting planning focus from deficit to strengths- and asset-based engagement; responding to the needs of the community when working collaboratively across academic and community contexts; and, foregrounding the importance of, and relationship to, place when doing community engagement work. This suite of practices illuminates the integrative solution-oriented thinking needed to address complex and intersecting issues of climate change and community health.
气候变化是一场环境危机、一场健康危机、一场社会政治和经济危机，它揭示了我们的人类与环境关系正处于关键转折点的方式。通过这些关系轴、社会结构和制度实践，产生了不平等的模式，其中气候变化不成比例地影响了包括农村和偏远社区在内的几个优先人群。为了进行基于证据的变革，重要的是，气候变化的参与应该由能够传达各种生活现实和知识形式细微差别的数据来提供信息；决策应该扎根于健康的社会、结构和生态决定因素；交叉视角应该为研究到行动的周期提供信息。我们的团队将数据的理论和公平驱动概念应用于我们在科特斯岛社区的工作中——不列颠哥伦比亚省萨利什海北部的一个偏远岛屿，以帮助他们进行气候变化适应和缓解规划。这项工作分五个迭代阶段完成，这些阶段是根据社区确定的需求和偏好确定的，包括：环境扫描、非正式范围访谈、参加社区论坛、范围审查以及共同制定社区调查问题，以指导岛屿气候变化适应和缓解计划的制定。通过这种社区主导的合作，我们了解到通过社区咨询纠正数据不准确和量化数据空白的重要性；将规划重点从缺陷转移到优势和基于资产的参与；在学术和社区背景下合作时，响应社区的需求；并突出在进行社区参与工作时，地方的重要性和关系。这一系列实践揭示了应对气候变化和社区健康等复杂和交叉问题所需的综合解决方案导向思维。
