Click to download IntegrativeThinkingTools.

These materials complement The Integrative Thinking Series: Environmental Issues, Policy and Management Collaboration Toolbox by Lynn Wilson and Janet Salmons available in several e-book formats  from Smashwords and your favorite e-book seller.

The  first of the The Integrative Thinking Series: Environmental Issues, Policy and Management Collaboration Toolbox by Lynn Wilson and Janet Salmons is available for purchase now from Smashwords, iTunes, Amazon, Kobo, Sony e-bookstore and Barnes and Noble.

The Environmental Issues, Policy and Management Collaboration Toolbox is intended to guide researchers, practitioners and students through a step-wise process to investigate, develop and implement environmental collaborations. Worksheets and models are available for download.

The Environmental Collaboration Toolbox consists of:  Part 1: Collaboration Essentials, Part 2: The Collaborative Integration Paradigm, and Part 3: Application of the Paradigm to Environmental Issues. Related worksheets and materials will be online soon to download from this site.

The Integrative Thinking Series offers a mix of practical tools and theoretical frameworks that aim to facilitate improved collaborative efforts in and across disciplines. Integrative thinking as explained in the Collaborative Integration Paradigm can be applied when partners want to accomplish important and innovative outcomes.

It is now mid-January. The media and the pundits have had their say on the progress and pitfalls of the COP16 meetings in Cancun. Most report that small, incremental progress was made and some trust in the United Nations climate change negotiation process restored.  Only Bolivia objected to the modest agreements as news of the 2010 COP fades from  public attention.  

 Are we to conclude that because the world has no climate agreement that nothing noteworthy occurred? I seem to answer this question on a near-daily basis.

SeaTrust Institute, its partners and the emerging Coalition focused on health at COP16.Nurses Across the Borders and SeaTrust Institute, with invited guests from the World Health Organization and PHI together with advisor/commentators  from Europe and Africa,  delivered a respectible official UN Side Event.  Post-conference comments have been consistently positive; the interest to continue working together remains high.   From this particular perch, I see something quite different from what was reported by the media .

Since COP16 (despite the holidays and the rush to get a jump on the business of the New Year), emails and phone lines and video chats have been alive with plans for health at COP17 in Durban, South Africa.  As one colleague recently put it, “we only have 11 months to go!”  SeaTrust Institute is actively engaging with both new and known entities in the effort to increase  recognition that all sectors define their success in terms of human health, both inside and outside the COP. The Coalition on Health and Climate Change continues to recruit experts to help review climate and health studies and to frame appropriate presentations of published, new and ongoing work at the nexus of climate change and human health.  Thanks to a generous donation from US Archive, the Coalition now has a document management system in place for coordinating peer review of academic work, anecdotal evidence from the field and interim research reporting in ways that will be organized and manageable. Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) is spearheading strategies to help frame joint organizational objectives and projects.The Coalition’s website will soon go live, and welcomes interaction with anyone who believes health outcomes are critical to climate change policy negotiations and to the applications of the best climate, medical and social science to address global climate change issues.

Peters Omoragbon from Nurses Across the Borders is currently in the U.S. and working with SeaTrust Institute as we begin our project of capacity building with local medical professionals in Nigeria on climate change adaptation strategies and disease surveillance .  With our partners from the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment, we will use the pilot project in Nigeria to show efficacy of  processes to aid local communities across the globe in assessing intervention options and  appropriately applying medical, climate and social science to decisions about  climate change and human health. A reporter from the WHO Bulletin contacted me about the project and plans to report on our progress throughout 2011. Peters will honor us with a first-ever visit to the Pacific Northwest in March, 2011. He will work directly with our team prior to training nurses on the ground in Nigeria.

One of our partners working outside the negotiation venue, Resilience Now, is led by the enterprising Raz Mason and plans for entertainment events together with deep thinking and learning about innovative ways to incorporate the best of resilience scholarship, art, story, tribal, spiritual and other inspirational wisdom into our UN negotiation processes and the South Africa experience. Another, Sarty Mountain, Inc., is mobilizing health and beauty industry support to bring health to the heart of climate change negotiation.

It has been said of COP16 that modest goals yield modest results. As an outcome of the COP, modest results may not make for interesting news stories but they can mean excellent progress for those working in the global climate regime.  If others are as productive as the health sector has been during in this first month following the conference (as I assume they are from the daily reported activities of many climate sectors), then the planning and trust-building in Cancun was certainly time well spent.  

Please follow future events through links to the Coalition on Health and Climate Change that will soon appear on this website and related links to our partner and collaborative organizations. We look forward to seeing you there and in Durban, South Africa.  

The negotiation process is slow. With ministers arriving, country statements are in pleading terms to get some action recorded for COP16. In contrast to Copenhagen, only 25 heads of state are scheduled to attend. 191 were in Denmark.

On the plus side for our own work, more health events have been placed ad hoc into the schedule. Maria Neiri, WHO’s head environmental liaison, has been particularly active.

And the negotiator from Ghana continues to be an ally of getting health more deeply imbedded in the text and in future work. Next yo her is Kristi Ebi, the lead on the AR5  report.

Our own event is in about an hour and a half.  I hope to have a glowing report from there.

Coming back after a long day of discussing toxins, health issues and vectors to find a fellow with a large canister spraying the perimeter of my room. He sees me and says in an animated voice,” Not toxic! Not toxic!”

So I pull back the curtains and start to open the glass door upon which is the message you see on the left. So this is why Cancun and tourist resorts thrive without Dengue and other diseases that plague the country.

I am certainly glad it isn’t toxic, but likely even more pleased that I have no mosquitoes here in the jungle. That is the tradeoff – chemicals for disease prevention.  That’s something to consider when looking at environmental issues and health, particularly in the tropics. It is easy to criticize single issues. The complex situation is a bit more challenging.

On the bus with a Japanese reporter, we agreed that Japan was only sightly less unpopular than the US in this forum. She had been taken to task fairly severely by the Chinese and was feeling frazzled by the experience. This is her first COP so I gave her a bit of background and she took my card — perhaps we shall find ourselves on Japanese news.

Yesterday we officially created the Health Coalition with the support of the World Health Organization. As we negotiate roles, it is interesting to see how power and flexibility can coexist. WHO has the power of a global UN affiliated organization but lack the flexibility of NGOs to address individuals and organizations head-on for their involvement in our work. We are trying to find our way through the politics so that we might have at least a loosely-affiliated group of those interested in health – the health sector. But we maintain that anyone interested in climate change has a health agenda so we are breaking the rules of sectors and soliciting broad participation – and that is something WHO cannot do. They, however, can convene negotiators and even ministers to hear our message. If we pull this off, we might actually accomplish a new way to work at these UN meetings.  The current working draft of the Coalition appears below. We negotiated this text between sessions on stools in the Mexico booth at the conference center. Things of this type happen quickly.

December 2, 2010

Cancun, Mexico

The Health Coalition - GIVING HEALTH ITS PLACE IN CLIMATE CHANGE POLICIES AND STATEMENTS

SeaTrust Institute and Nurses Across the Borders are the joint focal points for the Health Coalition – an emerging collaborative of organizations and individuals, nations and agencies that understand human health to be the standard by which all climate change actions, negotiations, treaties and plans are ultimately measured. Health is at the heart of all areas of climate change work.

The Coalition began with a small group meeting of 27 individuals in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009 at the UN Climate Change Meetings. In one year it has become an example of a successful collaboration across the global North and South through the issue that binds us all – our health.  Now in collaboration with the World Health Organization, which acts to liaise with NGOs, global agencies and nations, the Health Coalition is building momentum through engaging traditional health partners with other climate change actors in a different approach to reaching agreement.

Every area of climate change activity, from water to carbon, from REDD to sustainability, looks at human health and well-being as the success indicator. Rather than being considered as a specific sector, the Health Coalition is striving to build awareness that health crosses all sectors. In fact, it encompasses all sectors.  Good health is an asset to global economies and allows nations to co-create new solutions for climate adaptation and mitigation, which is why the popular adage has it that: health is wealth – the wealth of any nation is rooted in the health of the people – A healthy nation is a wealthy nation.

Health is central in Agenda 21, MDG and other climate texts. An immediate goal of the Health Coalition is to have the role of health explicitly recognized and stated in the UNFCC texts at the Cancun meetings. The work will continue after the conclusion of COP16.

In addition to policy engagement, the Health Coalition engages in tangible activities that build awareness and engagement with health and climate science. The keystone 2011 activity is the engagement of nurses with pertinent climate change science that affects their work locally, and that honors their professional expertise and position of trust as both disseminators of adaptation knowledge and as appropriate and well-placed collectors of local surveillance data on climate-related diseases. We begin these activities with the focal points of this Coalition – SeaTrust Institute, USA and Nurses Across the Borders NIGERIA in their engagement and training of Nigerian nurses. This process can be expanded in all global regions to bring health to the heart of climate change negotiation – through tangible action.

Come Tuesday 7^th December 2010 therefore, Sea Trust Institute and Nurses Across the Borders with support for our endeavors from the World Health Organization shall be organizing a Side Event here in Cancun Mexico on: HUMAN HEALTH: The Issue of/for Climate Change Adaptation Strategies, as part of catalyzing  a COP16 Health Coalition.

Joint Focal Point Contacts:

Dr. Lynn Wilson – SeaTrust Institute   www.seatrustinstitute.org +1 360-961-3363 USA

Pastor Peters OMORAGBON – Nurses Across the Borders: www.nursesacrosstheborders.org +234-805-265-8024, Nigeria, +44-1438729726 UK

Flowers in the sand – a growing vine across the white sand beach. See? I do take time to smell the flowers!