#HealthyClimate Prescription

Communication Toolkit for Individuals

COP26 is the first UN global climate summit since the start of the pandemic. With health dominating the political agenda, the health community has an opportunity to make a difference to the negotiations if we raise our voices together.

Signing the #HealthyClimate Prescription letter is an important step in the global effort for ambitious climate action, but we can do more as the health community to make sure decision makers and the general public understand the critical importance of reducing emissions and addressing climate change. Below, you’ll find resources to advocate for climate action and to spread the word about the letter.

Toolkit contents:

Resources will continue to be added to this toolkit in coming weeks. This will include a template op-ed and a twitter guide for coordinated social media action.  We will let you know by email about key advocacy moments and any important updates to this toolkit or the campaign.

Call on decision makers to act on climate change

National leaders and climate negotiators need to hear that health professionals want them to protect health by addressing climate change. Send a letter encouraging your country’s leader, environment minister, health minister, and lead national negotiator to protect health and save lives.

  • Please feel free to use this template letter as a starting point and to adapt it to your national context
  • Contact information for national negotiators is available here
  • You should be able to find contact information for your national leaders and their ministers on national websites

 

Encourage your organization and health colleagues to sign the letter

To make our voice is heard, we need both individual health workers and health organizations to sign the #HealthyClimate Prescription letter. The multilingual template letters below were drafted as “organization to organization” however they can easily be adapted to come from individuals to their organizations, or from individual to individual.

Tips for contacting organizational leadership

  • If your organization has made previous commitments on climate change, mention this in your letter
  • Determine who within your organization is responsible for policy and advocacy decisions. This might be:
    • an individual (an executive director, policy director, or campaigns director)
    • a committee (an environmental committee, a campaigns committee, a board)

Tips for encouraging your peers to sign on

  • Add a personal note describing why you signed the #HealthyClimate Prescription Letter
  • Present the campaign during a lunch brown bag session in your organization
  • Submit a short blurb to your organization’s newsletter

 

Make a statement in the local or national press

Health professionals frequently have success getting letters to the editor published in local and national media. A public statement in a major newspaper can put pressure on decision makers and can help shift public opinion, especially when it comes from a trusted source such as a health professional, while statements in your local newspaper can be especially influential on local public opinion.

If your letter or Op-ed is published, please let us know by email at: prescription [at] healthyclimate.net

 

Join the “Ride for their lives” virtual cycle ride to COP26

This October, fifty paediatric healthcare professionals from UK childrens’ hospitals will cycle over 500 miles from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London, to Glasgow and the UN’s climate conference COP26 to demand action on the climate and nature crisis.

  • Click here to sign up via the Strava app, wherever you are in the world, and commit to cycle 100 miles between 1st and 31st October 2021

 

Spread the word on Twitter

Learn more