Prompting Climate Action: A systems approach to designing a UN General Assembly Health Side Event
Learning patience, systems practice and the power of human connections were my greatest lessons from 2019.
One year ago, I got a job out of college organizing the CEO’s laptop of a small African-focused public health NGO. I had a background in biology, environmental studies, and I had just started with the School of System Change. My days in the office were filled with internal tension because all I could think about was how malaria, maternal mortality, and neglected tropical diseases would never be addressed without first tackling environmental degradation and the climate emergency. I was fixated on how I was far from the work I wanted to pursue and was instead stuck in this seemingly pointless work of saving lives with interventions rather than addressing the heart of both our global problem and source of premature and preventable deaths. That was a year of practicing patience while learning about the siloed advocacy landscape of global health, mapping the interconnections of human and environmental health, and talking with colleagues about these linkages.
Patience can be a valuable virtue even during our global emergency. This year, I was given the opportunity to design and manage our annual Universal Health Coverage Conference. On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, the conference typically featured senior leaders from African Presidents and the World Health Organization Director-General to CEOs of foundations, NGOs and corporations. With no prior experience in conferences, I jumped into the deep-end clutching systems practices and a dedication to leverage this opportunity.
I owe much of my sanity through this journey to the nested systems model amongst other system’s frameworks. In the early stages, the nested systems model grounded me in my own relationship to the conference, humbling me to develop a visionary and motivated team, outsourcing tasks and creating a unity behind a vision of drawing the connection between the environment and health. This connection was both complex and confusing and seemed to have no prior organizations or frameworks to guide us.
Intersection of Environment and Human Health | Three Panels
With a team of interns, we built a three-horizons diagram for each point where humans depend upon their environment: food, water and air. These topics became the conference panels and the three horizons diagram lay the foundation for the relevance and substance for each. I set my intention to use these three panels to delicately weave the criticality of discussing the climate emergency, environmental degradation, and environmental solutions into health conversations.
Environment and Human Health | Whole System Conversations
The three conference panels had to break health experts out of their current health topic silos into conversations spanning the entire health and environment systems. For example, the neglected tropical disease advocacy community is united by the fact that their various diseases are neglected by most health systems, yet the diseases themselves differ greatly by how they can be transmitted, prevented and treated. To break the silos, the panels on Water, Air and Food included diverse experts. The medium of a conference, for facilitating system’s change, lay in breaking apart existing siloed disease communities into panel conversations representing different whole-systems. For example, the head of neglected tropical diseases at WHO was now in discussion with experts on water security, sanitation, and hygiene access.
This structure encouraged panelists to find the common language of the system they were now a part of in order to converse together. The act of relating to the whole system could allow for a shift in the mindsets of senior leaders by making new connections about key stakeholders to include in decisions to get to the heart of current challenges. For example, the Food panel included someone representing: (1) agriculture & climate change, (2) small scale farmers, food sovereignty & food systems, (3) nutrition and health, (4) breastfeeding and maternal health, (5) obesity & diabetes and (6) policy and women’s health. The conversation caused panelists and attendees to make the connections within the system present on the panel and recognize differing perspectives of the system itself. This quote by the policy expert and Ugandan parliamentarian captures a moment of realization about the importance of these linkages for policy makers:
“I’m wondering whether or not we need to have a mechanism designed to encourage a conversation with all of the community across all of these issues. So it’s not just health stakeholders, but people who are mindful of agricultural, food and nutrition, and climate issues. Or do we have some sort of cross-sector Parliamentary process where we can speak across each other’s issues to develop a joint policy? What does that look like on the ground? Or does that need to be established in order for us to work in this way?”
Graphic Whole System’s Diagrams | Visual Aids
The whole system perspective for each panel was supplemented with diagrams displayed during the exhibition hall and located within the conference’s brochure. These diagrams reflected the currently advocated key areas within the system. Most advocated areas were also reflected by the panelists, and together they placed these areas in relation to the larger whole. Unlike typical system’s relational diagrams, these diagrams were highly graphic and placed people, depicted as a women, at the center to demonstrate both gender-equity and the people-centered nature of supporting human health. Additional details within each diagram included biodiversity or the environment such as the agriculture icon suggesting agroecology. Lastly, the side of each diagram was a list of the interconnecting Sustainable Development Goals.
Speeches & Seating Chart | Spur New Discussions
The conference included a high-level dinner and announcement ceremony, which sought to further enforce the value of political action at the intersection of health and climate change. The opening speaker was Dr. Gro Brundtland, who was both a former UN Special Envoy for Climate Change and WHO Director-General. The Director of the Green Climate Fund was invited to speak about new funding available for health system capacity-building and climate resilience, but in the last minute was called to speak at the Climate Action Summit. Small details such as the dinner seating chart were further curated to promote the development of new relationships amongst selected guests from development funds, foundations, non-governmental organizations, climate resilience organizations, academic institutions and conference panelists.
Other Sustainable Development Goals such as women’s equality were woven into the conference. Each panel featured a women’s equality advocate and the dinner awardee alongside four African Presidents was a youth advocate for sexual and reproductive health.
2019 was a deeply humbling year of patience, layers of various systems practices and the complexity and impact of human connections. As someone committed to climate action, this conference process has led me to no longer see health as “pointless”, but rather a powerful and underutilized leverage point to tackle environmental degradation and climate change. Climate change still is political, but health is not. This experience has opened this biologist’s eyes to the complex and often irrational human ecosystem of organizational relationships, politics and power. For me, the conference was a powerful learning exercise and experiment in how to use a single event to elicit change. Not only to have participants, panelists and sponsors commented on new relationships and realizations they made at the conference, but I have now been given the task of replicating the conference for next year and building a network of organizations working at these health and environment areas. Once again, I intend to lean into practicing systems thinking and leverage my take-away from this year’s conference to continue to promote climate action.
