Nature-based Solutions for Climate Change and Human Health
This session will inform key messages for upcoming WHO-IUCN guidance to catalyze health leadership for Nature-based Solutions, laying out concrete actions that COP attendees can take to mitigate and adapt to climate change, safeguard nature and ecosystem health as a means to improving health outcomes.
Photo: WHO
Ecosystem health is an essential precondition for health and well-being. It can provide resilience to climate change, attenuate risks posed by extreme weather events, help regulate pests and disease, support food security, access to freshwater, and mental health, and support livelihoods. Investing in Nature-based Solutions to protect, conserve and restore natural ecosystems can offer a catalytic opportunity for health, climate and conservation actors to work together to address common challenges and drive improved health outcomes. Building policy coherency at the public health, environment, and climate nexus through the lens of NBS can help prevent future health risks associated with ecosystem degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change. This session will showcase the intertwined connections between ecosystem health, climate change, disasters and human health and share best practices and actions that policymakers and other stakeholders can take to work towards shared solutions to shared and interconnected crises.
Key stakeholders from across the climate, health, humanitarian and conservation sectors, and policy makers will come together in an exciting dialogue focused on the health-environment-climate nexus, to support the health arguments for accelerating climate action, and how this can be taken forward within at the community, national to and global levels and within COP27 decisions.
Speakers will include:
- Dr. Maria Neira, Director of Public Health, Environment and Social Determinants of Health at WHO
- Stewart Maginnis, deputy director of IUCN
- Ali Raza Rizvi, Head of Climate Change, IUCN
- Dr. Omnia el Omrani, COP27 Presidency Envoy on Youth
- Dr. Maisoon Ali Al Shaali, Head of Environment at UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention
- Rayan Kassem, West Asia Regional Director of Youth4Nature
- Carol Devine, Lead of Humanitarian Action on Climate and Environment, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
- Dr. Chadia Wannous, One Health Global Coordinator, World Organisation for Animal Health
- Roberto Mukaro, Indian Treaty Council
- Dr. Kinari Webb, Founder, Health in Harmony
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