A Systems Map of the Challenges of Climate Communication.

Over the past sixty years, scientists have been warning about climate change and its impacts on human health, but evidence suggests that many may not be heeding these concerns. This raises the question of whether new communication approaches are needed to overcome the unique challenges of communicating what people can do to slow or reverse climate change. To better elucidate the challenges of communicating about the links between human activity, climate change and its effects, and identify potential solutions, we developed a systems map of the factors and processes involved based on systems mapping sessions with climate change and communication experts. The systems map revealed 27 communication challenges such as "Limited information on how individual actions contribute to collective human activity," "Limited information on how present activity leads to long-term effects," and "Difficult to represent and communicate complex relationships." The systems map also revealed several themes among the identified challenges that exist in communicating about climate change, including a lack of available data and integrated databases, climate change disciplines working in silos, a need for a lexicon that is easily understood by the public, and the need for new communication strategies to describe processes that take time to manifest.

Erratum: Paolo Lauriola et al., Advancing Global Health through Environmental and Public Health Tracking, Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 1976.

Due to an error during production, some contents of Table 1 are missing in the published paper [...].

Advancing Global Health through Environmental and Public Health Tracking.

Global environmental change has degraded ecosystems. Challenges such as climate change, resource depletion (with its huge implications for human health and wellbeing), and persistent social inequalities in health have been identified as global public health issues with implications for both communicable and noncommunicable diseases. This contributes to pressure on healthcare systems, as well as societal systems that affect health. A novel strategy to tackle these multiple, interacting and interdependent drivers of change is required to protect the population's health. Public health professionals have found that building strong, enduring interdisciplinary partnerships across disciplines can address environment and health complexities, and that developing Environmental and Public Health Tracking (EPHT) systems has been an effective tool. EPHT aims to merge, integrate, analyse and interpret environmental hazards, exposure and health data. In this article, we explain that public health decision-makers can use EPHT insights to drive public health actions, reduce exposure and prevent the occurrence of disease more precisely in efficient and cost-effective ways. An international network exists for practitioners and researchers to monitor and use environmental health intelligence, and to support countries and local areas toward sustainable and healthy development. A global network of EPHT programs and professionals has the potential to advance global health by implementing and sharing experience, to magnify the impact of local efforts and to pursue data knowledge improvement strategies, aiming to recognise and support best practices. EPHT can help increase the understanding of environmental public health and global health, improve comparability of risks between different areas of the world including Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), enable transparency and trust among citizens, institutions and the private sector, and inform preventive decision making consistent with sustainable and healthy development. This shows how EPHT advances global health efforts by sharing recent global EPHT activities and resources with those working in this field. Experiences from the US, Europe, Asia and Australasia are outlined for operating successful tracking systems to advance global health.