ASPPH, in its role as Secretariat for the Global Network for Academic Public Health (GNAPH), recently co-led the Climate-Ready Classrooms: A Public Health Faculty Development Course on Climate Change with the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE). The course concluded last month with more than 1,000 participants, most of whom were faculty from across schools and programs of public health worldwide.
The multi-week course consisted of 11 sessions, covering a comprehensive range of topics. Participants explored strategies for integrating climate content into public health curricula, delved into the science and drivers of climate change, and examined key health impacts, including extreme heat, declining air quality, vector-borne disease, waterborne risks, and food and water insecurity. Additional sessions focused on the resilience of health systems, sustainable and decarbonized service delivery, and effective communication and cross-sector collaboration.
Each session combined lectures from global subject matter experts with case studies highlighting innovative regional and local efforts to address diverse climate-related health challenges. These real-world examples grounded the curriculum in practice, demonstrating the relevance and urgency of climate-prepared public health leadership.
Dr. Laura Magaña, ASPPH president and CEO and founding president of GNAPH, moderated the final session on communication and collaboration. She closed by emphasizing the shared responsibility held by public health educators worldwide: “While climate impacts differ by place, while our experiences are unique, our responsibility as educators is universal: to prepare a workforce that can anticipate risk, translate science into practice, and lead with resilience, compassion, creativity, and courage.”
This course represents a significant step in strengthening global capacity to train a climate-ready public health workforce and advances ASPPH’s ongoing commitment to supporting academic public health in global action and confronting the climate crisis.