using the “Operational framework for building climate resilient health systems” Apply “Vulnerability, Capacity & Adaptation Assessment” as well as “Health and Climate research” to mental health and wildfire
Successful V&A assessment processes will often include inputs from academic experts, to ensure high quality evidence, as well as managerial and operational personnel to ensure relevance to policy and practice. The studies will examine health risks, such as heat stress, nutrition and vector-borne diseases separately, and consider how they interact with each other and with changes in other determinants, such as ageing and urbanization. Assessment teams will consider opportunities and constraints for responses throughout the causal pathway, from managing environmental health determinants, to disease surveillance, to control and treatment of specific diseases. Critically, the process will involve a range of stakeholders and use information from a variety of sources, including health and nonhealth scientific information, as well as community knowledge and feedbac
Branching Paths: Wild Fires in the Western United States
In recent times, environmental fires have become a growing concern in the Western United States. Environmental fires are characterized by climatic changes and global warming that has both planetary and psychological impact on living beings such as mental health issues. Although climate change is an ongoing phenomenon, environmentalists, policymakers and conservationists are in the frontline to devise a resilient approach to cushion people and the environment from the ravaging impacts.
Today, many people are susceptible to nutrition deficiency, vector-borne diseases, and heat stress due to the ravaging environmental fires that destroy extensive forest cover. A significant percent of the population is not able to shield themselves from the vagaries of nature. In this light, most of them are vulnerable to this vicious cycle primarily reflected in the poverty context by people living in a subsistence ecosystem. As people age and move from rural environmentally scourged areas to urban areas there will be more susceptible to mental ailment due to the existing trauma and disease outbreak. In this regard, health practitioners map out the geographical regions and populations most vulnerable to climate variability and change. They assess the capacity and potential of health systems to address them (WHO, 2015).
Through this framework, health practitioners will identify the weaknesses in the programs and devise ways to protect population health. From this perspective, environmental health practitioners and policymakers are keen on reaching the mentally affected people in rural areas to provide counseling services and treatment while devising strategies to reduce fire breakouts. In the preliminary stages, the stakeholders will evaluate the environmental health determinant, variations in disease risks, and the baseline against which protective measures can be monitored. Secondly, policymakers will use climate-based research to solve the growing menace. Collaboration with astronomers, environmentalists, epidemiologists, and the general public will provide knowledge and insights on the pattern, origin, manifestation of risk factors fueling the spread of diseases during fire outbreaks.
References
WHO. (2015). Operational framework for building climate-resilient health systems. Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
