Creative climate advocacy

Recorded On: 03/12/2020

Health professionals have a vital role to play at this critical time by calling attention to the many ways climate change impacts health. In this webinar, you will hear from three clinicians about the innovative ways they are mobilizing health care colleagues, drawing attention to the health impacts of climate change, and redefining health professional climate advocacy in the era of the climate crisis.

Increasingly, health professionals are concerned about the climate crisis and are motivated to find ways to take effective action. As trusted messengers they have many opportunities to leverage their influence and expertise to advocate for climate policy solutions to protect health. However, given the urgency of the climate crisis, along with inadequate governmental action, health professionals are turning to nontraditional forms of advocacy, including civil disobedience, to demand immediate solutions to protect our future.

Webinar participants will learn about innovative ways health professionals are taking action, including:

1. Demonstrating at Fire Drill Fridays
2. Delivering inspirational “climate train talks”
3. Forming nonviolent, clinician climate action groups with support from the Climate Disobedience Center
4. Calling on their institutions to divest from fossil fuels

Dr. Helena Clements

Sherwood Forest Hospitals Trust consultant general paediatrician and Women and Children’s Division clinical chair

Clements is a pediatrician with interests in neurodisability and palliative care. She has lived in a zero-carbon housing development for the last 22 years, where she and her husband have raised three children. In the last year, she has used her role as a senior pediatrician as a platform to discuss the climate crisis in terms of a health crisis. She joined Doctors For Extinction Rebellion in London in October 2019, delivering her first climate train talk on the way.

Katie Huffling, MS, RN, CNM, FAAN

Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments executive director and a certified nurse-midwife

Huffling works with nurses and national nursing organizations to elevate environmental health issues, such as climate change, toxic chemicals, and sustainability in health care. She was an editor of the environmental health e-textbook “Environmental Health in Nursing” that won the 2017 AJN Book of the Year in Environmental Health. Huffling was the recipient of the 2018 Charlotte Brody Award, which recognizes nurses who go beyond everyday nursing endeavors to proactively promote and protect environmental health.

Dr. Jim Recht

Harvard Medical School assistant professor of psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine adjunct clinical assistant professor of psychiatry, Cambridge Health Alliance staff psychiatrist Massachusetts General Hospital clinical consultant

Recht is a psychiatrist with clinical interests in substance use and the health effects of poverty, housing scarcity, and structural racism. Over the past several years, he has increasingly observed patients and their families struggling with climate change’s health harms. As a member of the Greater Boston chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, he has helped develop PSR’s climate change initiatives, and as a campus fossil fuel divestment advocate, he was a co-founder of Harvard Faculty for Divestment and the Boston All-Campus Divestment Collaborative. He is currently working with Boston-area physicians to explore possibilities for physician-organized, nonviolent civil disobedience to promote systemic policy changes needed to avert climate disaster.

Presentation slides