Climate and Health Seed Funding Projects

The interactive, strengths-based Climate Superpowers website was created with and for young people through the Young People’s Climate Superpowers project (2022). The Climate Superpowers in the Classroom project seeks to support students and teachers to draw upon the website and superpowers approach in educational settings.

The project began with small-scale processes of co-design and piloting focusing on one high school and one university in Melbourne. In 2023, we worked with students and teachers to co-develop a range of creative classroom activities based on the climate superpowers website, and supported them to pilot them within lessons. At the high school, the entire Year 10 cohort took part in games and a video-making competition to explore their climate superpowers. We also worked with university lecturers and tutors across three subjects at the university to develop and pilot classroom activities suited to undergraduate students, gathering reflections from teachers and students.

The next stages of the project include: expanding the Climate Superpowers website to include classroom resources arising from the co-design and piloting process so far; providing guidance on how the Climate Superpowers website aligns with school curricula and tertiary education; and holding events for education communities (school and university-based) interested in drawing on the Climate Superpowers approach in a range of classroom settings. The project aims to advance towards broader efforts to support strengths-based and engaging classroom approaches climate change across a wide range of educational settings. A new project extending this work with a focus on teacher experiences (the Teacher Climate Superpowers project) has recently begun thanks to funding from the Teachers Health Foundation.

Single use equipment in healthcare has become the standard practice in many countries globally. This leads to excessive waste, both financially and environmentally, and contributes to high carbon healthcare. Personal protective equipment (PPE) remains primarily single-use rather than reusable equipment. Disposable PPE is an important contributor to total single-use equipment in healthcare. There are alternatives to disposable PPE, for example, reusable gowns have been safely implemented within Australian hospitals by accredited suppliers, in place of disposable gowns. The aim of the Reusable Gowns research project is to trial reusable gowns within health services and understand the views of healthcare workers toward reusable gowns, the barriers and enablers to their implementation and use, and the environmental and financial impacts of replacing single use gowns with reusable equivalents.

So far, several key project milestones have been completed, including finalising the research protocol, obtaining ethics approval, developing data collection tools, recruiting participants, collecting data and piloting reusable gowns within a health service. Reusable surgical gowns have been trialled at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre by healthcare workers in surgical theatres. Participants taking part in the pilot completed surveys before and after trailing reusable surgical gowns, to gain information on their perspectives of using the reusable gowns (including comfort, durability and satisfaction), as well as the perceived barriers and enablers to implementing reusable gowns within health services. Furthermore, two additional health service sites may trial reusable gowns and be included in the Project. However, these sites are pending confirmation. At the conclusion of the reusable gowns project, a final research report will be delivered.

This research project aims to connect researchers and stakeholders with domain specific knowledge and experience in post-disaster sleep and associated mental health, to identify accessible Australian data, and develop a set of brief recommendations for measuring these outcomes for those conducting research and collecting data from people impacted by or at risk of future climate disasters.

The project outcomes include:

1. Establishment of an investigator group of researchers and researcher-clinicians with knowledge and experience across climate-related disasters, sleep, and mental health.

2. Identification and analysis of accessible Australian data on disaster impact on sleep and mental health.

3. Convening of a workshop of researchers and stakeholders to provide input on options for measurement of disaster impact on sleep and mental health, and to inform dissemination strategies.

4. Dissemination of above research recommendations for future research with climate-disaster impacted communities and individuals.

The first outcome has been achieved. Progress has been made against the second and third outcomes. A review of public resources and grey literature was conducted to identify accessible Australian data sources. These data were then reviewed to identify inclusion of disaster impact, sleep, and mental health measures. The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey was ultimately selected as a candidate for analysis based on the study criteria. Ethics and data access approvals have been sought and ascertained. Analysis has been progressing with this data and several learnings identified to guide recommendations and future research. Lastly, planning for the project workshop is currently underway, scheduled for late March, with details of the event being disseminated through the investigator teams existing networks.

Next steps for this project include convening the workshop and finalising and disseminating the developed recommendations.

Leads:

Claire Leppold - Research Fellow – Disaster, Climate, Adversity Unit, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, MDHS

George Taiaroa -  Research Fellow, Infectious Diseases, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

This project will gather resources on preparing for and responding to projected increases in overlapping infectious disease outbreaks and weather-related disasters. This will be accomplished by gathering information from Australian researchers, practitioners, policy makers and citizen science groups through a series of interviews and a co-design workshop with those who are working on or have an interest in engaging more on infectious disease outbreaks and disasters.

Mid-way progress update

Climate change is projected to increase the risk of both infectious disease outbreaks and weather-related disasters. However, we are finding that researchers and government and non-government workers are often constrained organisationally by single thematic or institutional focus on one of these risks (e.g. disasters or infectious diseases) but are not both able to address both at the same time. This project is examining ways that infectious disease outbreaks and disasters may overlap, and what we can do about it. Through the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, we are developing a series of future scenarios using Foresight methodology and working to identify ways that we may tackle these risks together.

To date, we have completed twenty qualitative interviews with relevant infectious disease and disaster stakeholders, including epidemiologists, citizen scientists, researchers, government workers, virologists, emergency managers, Indigenous health experts and a Nobel Laureate. In March 2024, we will be holding a workshop with participants to present findings, continue developing scenarios and discuss strategies for addressing these overlapping risks in a changing climate. We hope to build the community of engaged individuals in this area and create a format for continued discussion.

The findings of this work are anticipated to be publicly available by mid-2024, and may further impact the planning and delivery of activities for the Australian Centre for Disease Control (ACDC) and the Australian Institute for Infectious Disease (AIID).