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National Academy of Medicine, 23 September 2024

Opportunities for Strengthening Climate Education for Clinical Health Professionals

Climate change is a major threat to humanity, and health professionals have a critical role in addressing this challenge (Romanello et al., 2023). However many individuals currently lack the knowledge, skills, and abilities to effectively synthesize, address, and influence the public health impacts of climate change (Kircher et al., 2022). Increases in morbidity and mortality attributed to climate change are driving a need for informed practice among all health professionals (Lemery et al., 2020). Accordingly, health professional educators are now scaling up integration of climate and health risks into foundational, core curricula.

Health professional education for the clinician, in aggregate, has conspicuous knowledge gaps on basic health linkages, such as the environment as a determinant of health, health vulnerabilities susceptible to climate change, health care system sustainability and resiliency, and climate health communication. Building on accumulating climate science data, existing public health scholarship and foundations in analogous fields of planetary health, One Health and ecological health, nascent groups in academia, and in the non-profit space have established educational initiatives focused on climate change and health. As these groups have introduced core learning competencies and incubated differing curricula for varied clinical health professional constituencies, the contemporary assessment is that professionals now have a genuine, cumulative scale-up of climate and health curricula across the spectrum of health professional education.

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