Researchers at the University of Melbourne and the Pacific Climate Change Centre have received nearly 4.9 AUD million in funding from Wellcome to strengthen Pacific populations’ resilience to the health impacts of a changing climate.
PAVE – Health: Pacific Action to enhance the Visibility of Evidence on Health and Climate Impacts aims to rapidly upskill policymakers, researchers, and health practitioners to draw attention to and reduce climate-related health impacts across four Pacific Island Countries: Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Samoa and Solomon Islands, Kiribati.
Pacific island countries face imminent threats to human health from the impacts of climate change, however, lack capacity and resourcing to coordinate, document and implement necessary responses.
Currently, the Pacific region receives less than ten per cent of multilateral global adaptation finance, with health-specific projects globally receiving less than two per cent of multilateral adaptation finance.
This limited funding is exacerbated by a lack of localised data on climate risks to and impacts on health, limited or fragmented responses to these risks and impacts, and limited capacity to translate the information available for global policy bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The PAVE-Health Intervention will address resource and data shortages by:
- • Generating evidence on local climate-related health risks and impacts to address existing data and policy gaps
- • Making this evidence available for use by the health sector to access climate finance and advocate for policy action to address climate-related health impacts
- • Demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of a capacity-building program as an intervention to build sustainable capabilities in the Pacific.
“The Pacific region is uniquely and severely susceptible to the health impacts of climate change as a result of extreme and high-impact environmental events, including tropical cyclones, drought, sea-level rise, coastal inundation and floods. Yet it is under-resourced and underrepresented in the development of international health policies and practices,” says Ms Kathryn Bowen, Professor of Environment, Climate and Global Health in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health and Deputy Director of Melbourne Climate Futures.
"It is absolutely vital that we work with Pacific communities to collect and translate data that can inform and enhance local adaptation to these vulnerabilities and, even further, contribute to global responses to climate–health impacts."
Wellcome has committed AUD 4,899,891 to the project, which is led by Professor Bowen at the University of Melbourne, and will be conducted in partnership with the Pacific Climate Change Centre led by Ms. Ófa Kaisamy, hosted at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP).
”Our Pacific is a climate change hotspot, which generates the single greatest threat to both the physical and mental health of our Pacific people. We acknowledge the approval of the PAVE–Health intervention, which aims to unlock critical resources – financial, human and technical – for us to address current and future climate-related health risks by making the health impacts of climate change visible. This visibility is critical to accessing climate finance for climate change and health interventions,” said Ms. Ófa Kaisamy, Manager of the Pacific Climate Change Centre.
The project will be conducted with the guidance and collaboration of local communities, policymakers, practitioners and researchers to ensure it is relevant and applicable to the Pacific populations it sets out to support.
Photo of Samoa, D. McFadzien