On March 29th, the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research held a collective discussion, led by Carol Devine and Yasmin Al-Sahili. Devine is a Community Scholar at the Dahdaleh Institute working on a framework for Planetary Health Advocacy. Al-Sahili worked on the Planetary Health Advocacy Framework, as a research assistant, with Devine.

The question that animated the group is: how do we build strategies to frame and communicate knowledge about planetary health? The aim is to develop principles that further advocacy in the areas of humanitarianism, global health, planetary health, and climate change.

What began as a framework has evolved, Devine and Al-Sahili emphasize, more into a "tool for advocacy" that explores the impacts of climate change on health. The tool is meant to inform operational programs to mitigate climate change and advocacy for new ways of living that are sustainable for humans and for other life on earth.

As a living tool, it is constantly and sometimes rapidly changing in response to dialogue from a wide range of actors. This dialogue is vital. As Devine paraphrases Indigenous Planetary Health leader Dr. Nicole Redvers, climate change will not be resolved by technical fixes. Instead, “what will solve the climate crisis is language and dialogue”.

While developing the tool, a major question is figuring out how to effectively communicate knowledge to diverse audiences. A circular design with multiple rings, for instance, seeks to show the interconnectivity of different elements. This recalls the relationships between human health and the wellbeing of the natural world, as well as known solutions among and across different actors.

Indigenous peoples and local communities are especially important, Devine emphasized, to biodiversity stewardship and knowing climate change solutions.

Al-Sahili echoes this view. She emphasizes the importance of understanding colonialism and colonial practices in exacerbating climate change-associated health consequences. Those who have been subject to colonialism suffer the most immediate effects of climate change," Al-Sahili observes," but they have contributed the least to global warming. The voices of those with non-western worldviews, and specifically Indigenous knowledges, perspectives, and ways of doing, are critical to decolonizing planetary health tools."

This means recognizing that we live in a pluralistic world, where many different ways of knowing co-exist.

Many Western-trained scientists understand the world in terms of systems and variables. This may be very different from how other communities and cultures make sense of themselves and their environments. Despite the diversity across and within their communities, many Indigenous peoples, for instance, understand the world as embedded in strong, even sacred responsibilities to the lands that have been theirs from time immemorial. Indigenous scientists may bring their Indigenous knowledges to problem-solving as they seek to understand and mitigate climate change.[1]

The framework must respond to competing paradigms. As a living tool, it always has room for change, updates and improvements.

Participants at the seminar had many ideas they contributed to the conversation.

Some suggested that it would be useful to add stories to the tool to illustrate and communicate knowledge to broad audiences. Stories represent us and are central to who we are as human beings. As Professor Orbinski observed, “While we have a lot of science about climate change, we don't have many stories”.

Compelling narratives, as much as or in combination with science, are necessary to help us to understand the challenges that climate change represents.

Others proposed developing a certificate program within the Institute for Global Health Research to share knowledge within academia about the critical importance of planetary health.

In addition, the tool for planetary health needs to be relevant beyond academia. To be meaningful, participants emphasized, the tool has to be understandable for many people. Some participants suggested building a website to make the tool interactive, dynamic and accessible to a wide range of users.

Out of the lively discussion, the relationship between global health and well-being and planetary health was emphasized again and again. We will only become healthy, as communities, when we live in healthy ecologies. That demands that we do what we can to mitigate climate change and prevent more negative impacts, suffering and loss, while simultaneously advocating to secure more ecologically sustainable and equitable futures.

[1] See, for instance, Anishinaabe scientist Dr. Myrle Ballard:

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Written by Elaine Coburn, Director of the Centre for Feminist Research

The United Nations’ conference on climate change, the COP 27, held in Egypt in November 2022, was a massive failure. The Climate Finance Delivery Plan, established in 2009, for instance, promised 100 billion American dollars per year to support climate change mitigation and adaptation in the developing countries. This promise remains largely unfulfilled. This failure to come to a global agreement will have consequences for our planetary biosphere, and so for human health, argues the Director of the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, Professor James Orbinski.

There is already massive human suffering directly linked to ongoing failures to take up the climate change, which is the existential crisis of our times. Food security is a major crisis worldwide, Orbinski said, so that about 800 million people today are not able to meet their basic food needs. He noted that famine-like conditions exist in 43 countries today, directly caused or accelerated and exacerbated by global warming. For other forms of life, climate change is causing the sixth great extinction and this time, unlike the extinction that killed off the dinosaurs, the cause is not a meteorite hitting the earth, but global warming and ecological degradation, caused by human beings. 

Given the crisis, action is required. Locally, this demands responses that are community based and that take up the complexities of the ecosystem upon which all life, including human life, depends.

In the Chilwa Basin in Malawi, Orbinski’s team is taking an approach that seeks to engage the community and policy makers together. The aim is to produce research that can inform practices that will help local actors mitigate and adapt to the human health impacts climate change. This demands a careful understanding of the realities of a particular community, for instance, including gender dynamics and differences in health status across different age groups. Housing, fishing, animal husbandry, access to the water and the quality of water, and an appreciation of what is held sacred, Orbinski emphasized, all matter to creating meaningful models of complex local ecosystems.

Combining community knowledge with other sources of data from across different ministries, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), United Nations Agencies, and  satellite-based data, and across different disciplines, is another challenge. This is necessary for better understandings of local ecosystems, Orbinski argues, but there are political, logistical and technical solutions that have to be found to make that knowledge compatible, analyzable and then usable.

In the Chilwa Basin, one concern is that fuel needs are met through charcoal burning, which contributes to global warming and local deforestation. The deforestation then leads to soil erosion, which in turn, with its high nitrogen content, causes eutrophication of lake water, leading to the proliferation of disease-causing pathogens, making people sick. If alternative, nature-based, sustainable solutions to meeting fuel needs can be found, Orbinski observed, then local community health can be improved and climate change can to some extent, be mitigated. Creating effective and equitable solutions to these kinds of practical problems are at the heart of the institute's pragmatic approach to climate change and planetary health.

Another example of modelling climate change events in the Chilwa Basin is the successful development of models around flooding, Orbinski noted. For that project, the team used satellite data, and data from governments, community organizations, NGOs and others, to map and quantify relationships across a wide range of variables. Graphic representations of those relationships were then mapped onto the relationships of other sub-systems, enabling a new understanding of complex correlations across sub-systems. The aim is then to develop applications that can be used by local people and policy makers in health adaptations, early warning and disaster management.

In all cases, Orbinski emphasized, it is critical to recognize that how a given variable is valued depends on who is looking at it. A community actor may understand a piece of land as especially significant, while the same land may be seen as relatively unimportant by an engineer from outside the community seeking to modify a flood plain. When modelling outcomes or simulations, attentiveness to the community partner and to the range of values is important, if solutions are to be effective, equitable and politically acceptable.

There is a global governance process that includes the COP conferences, that aims to mitigate climate change. Those processes are failing, but must succeed if we are to take up climate change as the existential crisis of our times. But there are immediate, local needs that must be addressed, Orbinski remarked, since climate change is already here. These demand community-based local solutions that recognize the complexity of local, life sustaining ecosystems.

Ultimately, the solutions to climate change are not technical. For those of us who grew up with the Enlightenment narrative about human beings’ dominion over nature, Orbinski emphasized, we need a new story:

 â€śWe need a new way of relating to each other and to our biosphere on which we depend, which is not extractive, which it is not about power over nature and power over others. Finding and creating that story is not declarative. Instead, it is a dialogical process that emerges across cultures, across communities, and across time, and it begins with looking to our responsibilities now and to future generations.”  

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Victor Phillip Dahdaleh

91ŃÇÉ« has announced the establishment of The Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health to address some of the most pressing issues of our time. The announcement was made on Tuesday, Dec. 8.

The institute will be a leader and a catalyst in addressing global health issues. It will provide a robust context for students involved in 91ŃÇɫ’s Global Health program, as well as for academics and researchers working in the field at the University and around the world.

“We are thrilled that Dr. Dahdaleh shares our vision to build on 91ŃÇɫ’s strength in global health,” said Mamdouh Shoukri, president and vice-chancellor of 91ŃÇÉ«. “The Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health will serve as a focal point for international dialogue and collaboration in health innovation research and teaching that will have global impact and make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, now and in the future.”

The Dahdaleh Institute will reflect the multidisciplinary nature of global health with involvement from Faculties across the University, initially focused within the Faculty of Health. This initiative has been made possible by a transformational donation from Victor Phillip Dahdaleh, a U.K.-based Canadian business leader. Announced recently, Dahdaleh, who graduated from the University almost four decades ago, made a donation of $20 million, the largest gift ever given by aĚý91ŃÇÉ« graduate.

“I am excited and honoured to contribute to 91ŃÇÉ« as it addresses global health and equity challenges through research, social innovation, international collaboration and leadership development, and prepares the next generation of global health leaders,” said Dahdaleh.

The institute’s work will lead to a reframing of the ways in which high- and low-income countries collaborate in the co-creation of solutions to global health challenges. A strategic advantage is 91ŃÇɫ’s focus on equity and its extensive range of global partners and networks linked to the culturally diverse Greater Toronto Area. These global-local links provide unparalleled opportunities for collaborative research and knowledge mobilization that address pressing health and social concerns.

Dahdaleh’s donation will provide both immediate and permanent funding to establish new Faculty positions, research initiatives and projects, scholarships and travel grants for domestic and international students.

In honour of this transformational gift, the University is officially naming the on its Keele campus.Ěý

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