Engagement objective

Climate change is affecting the health of 2 billion people across 11 countries in South-East Asia and threatens to upend decades of progress made on health. While SBCC has been used successfully for public health programmes, its usage to mitigate health impacts of climate change and climate adaptation are relatively newer domains and calls for pulling in learnings from multi-sectoral SBCC experiences.

StratComm was asked to undertake this unique exercise of developing a toolkit for community campaigns linking climate and health.

Our process

At the outset we sought to understand the nature of campaigns on health in select South East Asia region (SEAR) countries. What were the priority climate impacted public health concerns and what were the nature of campaigns around them in focus countries. Further, we sought to understand the nature of climate linked campaigns and links drawn if any between the two themes.

Our findings pointed to the presence of more community level SBCC strategies and campaigns linked to public health priorities and larger personnel and communications support for public health. Keeping the feasibility of implementation and expanding reach, the focus of the toolkit developed by StratComm was to zero in on the process of integrating climate messaging into a public health SBCC campaign framework.

Key outcome

The Climate-health integrated community campaign (CHICC) Toolkit provides guidance for people and organisations who would like to integrate climate change communication in health campaigns. The toolkit provides direction on the entire lifecycle of such an integrated campaign, dovetailing with an existing health campaign. Through examples, the toolkit outlines the process from conducting assessments to building and monitoring an integrated campaign. The toolkit focuses on public and community level messaging with scope for local level advocacy actions.

The CHICC toolkit uses Malaria and Vector Borne Diseases (VBD) as a running campaign example and demonstrates the process through which climate messaging can be integrated on a malaria or VBD campaign. However the relevance of the CHICC Toolkit is not limited to VBDs. Using the tools outlined in the toolkit organisations can layer climate messaging on any health campaign.