Bridging knowledge gaps: LuxOR's role in enhancing MSF's climate change preparedness
In 1 click, help us spread this information :
In a recent report with The Lancet, Médecins Sans Frontières' Luxembourg Operational Research Unit (LuxOR) highlights the impact of climate change on healthcare, showcasing operational examples. LuxOR bridges knowledge gaps, improves data collection, and integrates local insights to better prepare for climate-related health crises.
MSF is also assessing how well governments worldwide are delivering on their climate commitments under the Paris Agreement and calls to the parties of the UNFCCC to deliver at COP29.
Read the 2024 Joint Brief Read the Lancet Countdown Report
MSF works with within vulnerable context in which populations are disproportionately affected by climate change despite being the least responsible for the emissions that are generating the climate crisis.
In response, MSF teams are engaged in developing environmentally-informed health and humanitarian interventions across six focus areas: mitigating carbon footprints, filling research gaps, enhancing early warning systems and partnerships, assessing vulnerability and risk, improving disease surveillance, and building adaptable programmes for climate impacts.
Each area is interdependent, meaning failure to address one not only impedes progress on that specific component but also affects an entire sequence of subsequent actions.
The 2024 Lancet-MSF joint brief is linked to the launch of the “Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate 2024 report”, which monitors the changing impacts of climate change on health, and assesses how well governments worldwide are delivering on their climate commitments under the Paris Agreement.
This 2024 joint brief draws on evidence from indicators in the Lancet Countdown to present examples of how climate change and environmental degradation are making provision of assistance more difficult by amplifying health and humanitarian needs and by further complicating interventions. The join brief also highlights activities that respond to the climate crisis using a three pillar approach: decreasing MSF’s environmental footprint; adapting healthcare delivery and emergency response to the current and future realities of climate change; and advocating for those impacted.
LuxOR’s contribution to this brief focus on the challenges and initiatives related to integrating climate and environmental data into public health surveillance, especially in humanitarian contexts.
LuxOR's critical role in strengthening MSF’s response to climate-driven health crises
As stipulated in the Lancet Countdown, trends in weather patterns are changing and are having a real measurable effect today in the communities that MSF, and LuxOR concretely, operates in.
“In many of these contexts the impact of climate change is often more direct and more difficult to mitigate due to the often-increased risks and vulnerabilities in such context, such as the lack of resources and partly functioning of absent health care systems. This also brings up the question on how we can better anticipate on action and get ourselves operationally better prepared”, explains Dr. Amrish Baidjoe, LuxOR’s director.
“In this aspect, LuxOR supports MSF projects in driving research that addresses such knowledge gaps but also supports better data collection to assess the links between health and climate change in working with different partners and communities.” precises Dr Baidjoe.
An important asset in organizing anticipatory actions to climate disasters is the understanding and inclusion of local community’s knowledge and actions.
“As a matter of fact, communities, being the most impacted, are as well the first responders. The 2024 join brief stresses the importance of integrating local knowledge into research on consequences of climate and environmental degradation, to make the actions more sustainable, and contextspecific.”, Dr. Umberto Pellecchia, Qualitative Research Advisor for LuxOR
At COP29, MSF calls for meaningful climate action to protect the health of the most vulnerable
The real cost of the climate crisis is paid by the world’s most vulnerable people - the ones we see in our waiting rooms. They are paying with their health and their lives for a problem they did not create. But far too little is being done to protect them.
MSF therefore call to the parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to deliver at COP29. The organisation needs to see meaningful action to protect the health of the most vulnerable:
• Climate action that equals the scale of the climate emergency and that includes solutions to safeguard health.
• Real commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions which cause massive health problems worldwide.
• Concrete financial and technical support that reaches the people who suffer the heaviest impacts of climate change.