Co-Designing Healthier Climate Policies
This suite of resources have been co-designed by a cohort of Victorian state and local government policymakers. They have been developed to support policymakers across sectors and the community to better understand how climate change impacts health and how to improve health outcomes when developing climate and health-related policies and programs. They represent an important step forward in supporting the mainstreaming of health in climate policy development at the subnational level.
This collaborative project represented a research partnership between the Victorian Department of Health, the Western Alliance for Greenhouse Action (WAGA), and the University of Melbourne. It was generously supported by a VicHealth Research Impact Grant. Additional funding is being sought to evaluate the toolkit and to develop more resources to further support policy and practice.
Toolkit resources
These evidence-based resources have been designed to explain the interconnections between climate change and health, and how actions in policy and practice can improve health outcomes.
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Multiple health benefits of climate mitigation measures
This decision support tool describes the health benefits of climate mitigation measures by system/sector.
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Multiple health benefits of adaptation measures
This decision support tool describes the health benefits of climate adaptation measures by system/sector. A modifiable template is available to enable updates and changes given context-specific needs across settings.
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Health Co-benefits of Climate Action
This two-page summary of the health co-benefits concept has been designed to support policymakers across departments understand the potential returns on investment as they develop climate policies and programs. A modifiable template is available to enable updates and changes given context-specific needs across settings.
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Climate and Health: Understand risks, impacts and how to act to protect your health and wellbeing
This brochure provides an overview of climate and health to help community members understand climate-related health risks and impacts, and how to act to protect personal and others’ health and wellbeing. It is available in six languages: English, Traditional and Simplified Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese and Punjabi. A modifiable template is available to enable updates and changes given context-specific needs across settings.
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Climate change, health and policy development: An introduction
This slide deck represents a training resource for policymakers to support institutional learning on the health impacts of climate change. A modifiable template is available to enable updates and changes given context-specific needs across settings.
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Climate and Health Economic Tool (CHET)
This ‘beta’ version tool interprets the World Health Organization’s 2023 Climate-Health Economic Framework for the quantification and economic valuation of health outcomes originating from health and non-health climate change mitigation and adaptation action. It provides steps for evaluating climate and health outcomes together for better analysis of policies and programs.
About the research project
Climate change is already substantially impacting the physical, mental, and emotional health and wellbeing of Victorians. From extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, to changes in air, food, and water quality, there are numerous pathways that see climate change affect health. Climate-related harm can be reduced through implementing mitigation and adaptation measures that consider health outcomes. Importantly, measures with health benefits can reduce public health costs, offset policy costs and enable policymakers to develop comparatively ambitious policies.
While there is increasing awareness of the health impacts of climate change both within and beyond the health sector, many policymakers lack access to evidence to support strong adaptation business cases for investment (including expected return on investment, taking quantifiable health outcomes into account) in climate policies and programs. The evidence-based resources developed as part of this project begin to address this evidence gap. Importantly, the project has catalysed critical conversations about climate change and health across Victorian government levels.
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Project funder
The development of this toolkit was generously funded through a VicHealth Impact Research Grant. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of VicHealth. We wish to acknowledge the generous contributions of state and local government policymakers who co-designed the toolkit resources.
