Facilitating Science to Policy, a Knowledge Exchange Platform for Climate-Informed Health Policy in East and West Africa

Changing climates and extreme weather events are resulting in catastrophic impacts to ecosystems, human health, household livelihoods and national economies. These climate-induced impacts are creating increasing health-related vulnerabilities such as the introduction of new diseases due to increased severity and shifting weather patterns, human migration and displacement, food insecurity and resulting malnutrition, extreme heat, and increased air pollution. In many African countries, these impacts are putting additional strain on already weak health systems and putting populations at greater risk due to the current lack of knowledge exchange and collaboration between climate and health sectors. The lack of engagement, due to the existing isolation between national systems prevents health systems and healthcare providers from being adequately and accurately informed about existing and upcoming health crises.

Sustainable Health and Well-being (SDG3) is central to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, however, to achieve this, health policy and practitioners need to be aware of the climate-induced impacts on health. Furthermore, health practitioners need to be supported through climate-informed health policy. This Knowledge Exchange Program looks to directly address this challenge of limited engagement and information sharing, and the resulting poorly informed health systems. To demonstrate need and facilitate knowledge exchange, this program will implement a comparative knowledge exchange program between Ghana and Uganda. The Participatory Knowledge Exchange Platform, will increase and facilitate dialogue, engagement between climate and health sectors through participatory workshops, regional learning events, and policy roundtables. This will facilitate the co-development of the technical evidence base needed to enable interdisciplinary policy development. The informed policy development will help to facilitate the use of climate science in health sector policy and practice. Moreover, this program will create wider impact to NERC science through demonstration of effective knowledge exchange pathways to facilitate application of scientific research into policy.

The overall objective of this Knowledge exchange program is to is to pull through NERC science in the region to inform the development of climate-health policy in East and West Africa. By doing this, cross-sector knowledge exchange will be able to better support key policies such as health national action plans, informed by the necessary technical evidence base.
This will be achieved by
1) Using unique participatory knowledge exchange tools such as constructive dialogue mechanisms, workshops, and policy roundtables to support engagement and information sharing across the traditionally isolated sectors.
2) Using scientific research (health, meteorology, climate science, livelihoods) to inform policy makers across health and climate sectors.
3) Improving the understanding of climate risks with practitioners such as healthcare providers through supporting the co-development evidence base.

The project will provide opportunities for additional impact scale at national, regional and global level by collaboration and sharing findings through policy briefs, meetings, and presentation to key UK actors. Collaboration with major NERC projects such as Unlocking the Potential of Groundwater for the Poor (UPGro), Future Climate for Africa, and the Global Challenges Research Fund will create further impact by demonstrating effective multi-sector engagement and application of scientific research. This program will also inform the UK's Overseas Development Assistance agenda.