“Try being nice first, but accept you may need to escalate.”
“Our best guess is that the average person needs to see and hear about climate at least 80 times a month — potentially even more — to become an active supporter of significant climate action.”
“People believe they will be protected from harm – they think if things were really that bad [with climate emergency], they wouldn’t be allowed to continue.”
These three pearls of wisdom were shared in FPH’s recent series of webinars on advocacy for climate and health, organised by us as members of the Sustainable Development Special Interest Group. In case you missed them, this blog summarises our work in this area, to help all public health professionals reflect on and sharpen their own advocacy skills, and apply them to the ‘biggest threat to global public health in the 21st century’: climate change.
What we did
In 2021, the Faculty of Public Health (FPH) published its first Climate and Health Strategy (2021-25). Advocacy was one of the core priorities and we, along with several others, signed up from the special interest group to work it. We quickly identified the need for actions across five main areas, which included:
- Some scoping, reviewing and learning from others and the past
- Develop focused proactive advocacy on a very small number of issues
- Develop mechanisms for reactive advocacy
- Skills programme and networks and other support for members and SIGs doing advocacy
- Developing our Theory of Change for advocacy
This blog focuses in particular on areas (1) and (4) in order to support FPH members to develop the skills for advocating on climate change, environment, and health, specifically for those most affected by climate change and environmental breakdown. To deliver this, we first conducted an ally mapping exercise, followed by a ‘quick and dirty’ literature review. This was to inform the FPH’s five advocacy work areas within the climate and health strategy, and lay a foundation for future work on building advocacy skills specifically. We wanted our work to be useful and built on over time, so we produced a full reading list, a slide set summary which we shared at a webinar, and resources for colleagues building proactive advocacy campaigns around climate and health (like the current campaign to prevent fossil fuel expansion).
To start a skill–building programme, we conducted a survey of members of the FPH to understand what colleagues felt were key skills gaps in this area. Confidence and skills around communications came out as a major gap, so we set about putting on webinars that shared knowledge and enabled peer learning. These webinars also included feedback and evaluation which added to our understanding about advocacy skills needs. Once finished, we brought learning from all steps together to form a set of recommendations for advocacy skills training.
What we found
In addition to communications, other skills gaps among FPH members in the climate advocacy space included negotiating for resources, how to make use of a vast evidence base, building useful networks, and achieving and maintaining change. The literature review also suggested that social change / social movement theory, critical analysis and systems thinking were topics about which public health professionals would benefit from learning.
The existing literature demonstrated that advocacy can be effective at achieving population and planetary health improvements, and also identified some key ingredients for successful advocacy in this area. Whether it’s collaborating with diverse stakeholders, using strategic framing, or using theory to inform campaigning, we know there are ways we can increase our chances of success in advocacy, and we know these approaches and tactics can be learned and practised.
There were also more detailed lessons extracted from webinars on what has worked in the past for FPH presidents, internal and external communications for climate and health, which you can explore here under the Advocacy CPD and learning resources section: https://www.fph.org.uk/policy-advocacy/special-interest-groups/sustainable-development-special-interest-group/resources-on-climate-change-and-health/
Across everything we did, we identified three key messages:
- Advocacy is an important public health skill
- We don’t get sufficient opportunities to learn and practise advocacy skills
- We’ve explored advocacy (and specifically skills for advocacy) through a climate and health lens but our findings are more widely applicable
What next for the FPH as an organisation?
Across the board, it’s important that the FPH looks for more opportunities to incorporate advocacy into curriculum and continuing professional development. Over the last year or so, we have scratched the surface of what an advocacy training programme could do with our climate and health webinars. It is therefore essential that a longer term programme of advocacy training and learning is put in place for all public health professionals, who can then apply these skills to a variety of different contexts (including climate change and health). This could take many possible forms, but we know from our work so far that it needs to (1) help people learn about key topic areas (which are current gaps), such as systems thinking, gaining political commitment, policy support and social acceptance for climate action, and (2) apply their learning through practice. This is not only in line with the ASPHER competencies that the FPH has already endorsed, but it also overlaps with the skills and actions required to counter the commercial determinants of health, and pushes professionals towards bolder approaches such as the planetary health education framework.
What can public health professionals do now?
If you weren’t able to join the webinar sessions, you can catch up now on YouTube with the external communications session here, and the internal communications and persuasion session here. Visual summaries from the sessions can also be found on the FPH resource pages here. The summary of the scoping work (including findings from the literature review and the reading list) can be found here.
Practice is another key aspect of strengthening advocacy skills, so if you would like to join small, informal groups of FPH members who are working to improve their communications and advocacy skills in relation to climate change and health specifically, please email anna.brook1@nhs.net.
Advocacy is an essential skill for all public health professionals, so we hope you will join us as we work to strengthen training around this topic.
Anna Brook and Emily Loud, members of the FPH Sustainable Development SIG
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