The Time To Turn Words Into Action In The Planetary Health Community
Iris Blom, Campus Ambassador
University of Amsterdam
In January of 2020, I was honored to join the Planetary Health Alliance as a Campus Ambassador. As Campus Ambassadors, we are responsible for creating awareness on our campus on the topic of planetary health. I was ready to do so, by organizing an accredited conference at my university on the topic of climate change and health in March. However, things did not work out as planned.
In December of last year, the first reports came in from China about the novel coronavirus. In March, the Netherlands started going into lockdown as well. As campus ambassadors from universities from all over the world, we realized that this pandemic underlined the very interconnectedness between the health of our planet and human health that we had been advocating for from the start. Even though our initial initiatives were halted, we realized that we needed to come together and take action. We connected online and started organizing weekly meetings. Through these weekly meetings, very creative ideas sprung up.
To date, the initiative I am most proud of is an opinion piece that several of us authored on the topic of planetary health and COVID-19. This piece underlines the interconnectedness between human health and the health of our planet, as illustrated by COVID-19. It also puts forth a specific call to action directed towards Higher Education Institutions worldwide.
As Campus Ambassadors, we are widespread across the globe. Even though we hail from different time zones and different cultures, study at different universities, and have different backgrounds, we managed to combine our perspectives into one overarching voice and construct our article as a team. We chose to direct our action points towards Higher Education Institutions in particular, since they are well-linked with our position as campus ambassadors and because we believe that through education and research, the biggest steps can be made to create a healthier planet and more environmentally sensitive community.
Many meetings later, we had finally managed to write up a complete manuscript. We decided to submit the manuscript for publication, and were extremely excited when it got accepted for publication at first submission. We have remained in close contact to make the final adjustments, and cannot wait to share the publication when it is out.
One of the action points within our piece focused on connecting scientific evidence with the wider community. Oftentimes the scientific world experiences a disconnect with others, because of many factors, including prejudice. However, the correct transfer of scientific information in an digestible way also impacts this connection. Especially during the current pandemic, we have seen many examples of both successful and unsuccessful communications between scientists and the wider public. This connection might, in turn, impact the success of the COVID-19 response.
We were also very aware of the importance of connecting our piece with the wider public. Even though our action points are specifically geared towards Higher Education Institutions, it is still essential to gain wide support for these action points if we want them all to be successfully implemented across the globe. Therefore, we started thinking of ways to relay the information within our piece to the wider public.
We came up with several different strategies consisting of both spreading awareness on the piece and putting it’s information in different formats. First, we are working with the Planetary Health Alliance to circulate our piece within different channels including social media. Via these channels, we can ensure that the piece reaches a wider audience and hopefully gains wider support. We also created a poster, which summarizes the main points of our piece in very few words. Moreover, effort was put in to make the poster visually attractive. Lastly, our final idea was to use yet another type of mechanism to share our ideas.
This final idea required some further work. We decided to create a video to share our piece’s message. We created a script that had similarities with the piece, and then thought of the best way to deliver the message, whilst staying true to the campus ambassador community. We came up with the idea of asking all members of the community to record different parts of the script. In the end, we would connect all videos together into one. In this way, different voices from different places across the globe would jointly deliver this message. Planetary health itself requires cooperation between people from all over the world with all different backgrounds. Therefore, connecting all these different voices into one video seemed like a meaningful way to deliver this message.
We connected with the campus ambassadors and the Planetary Health Alliance community as a whole to create this video. We are still in the final stages of editing the video, but we are very excited to share it. At the end of the video, all participants share a small sentence in their mother tongue. We hope that this video will serve the right purpose by connecting a wider audience to our message.
In conclusion, I am very excited about this project and the reach and impact that it can bring. During our weekly meetings, we have also developed other new, creative ideas which we are currently working on. Through connecting and discussing with each other, we have seen many of these amazing ideas come to fruition. We have realized that the current momentum is a momentum of fast change, in which awareness on the topic of planetary health is growing fast. I am proud that we are using our voices to instigate change during this unique moment in time. I do want to call all of us to action, to realize that this is just the beginning. These projects are opening up the conversation where it did not exist yet, but we have to ensure that these conversations continue in order for solutions to be implemented. We have to make sure that we do not ‘return to the old normal’, but create a new one. We have done amazing work so far, but let’s keep our energy going. Let’s keep combining our different perspectives into valuable outcomes and keep changing the world to make sure that we take care of the health of our planet in strong connection to our health as humans.
