Description
Climate Change and Critical Health Policy examines climate change and other planetary health threats (biodiversity loss, pollution, resource depletion) as fundamental ecological and political crises with profound implications for health and health policy. The course adopts a critical ‘policy for health’ perspective, situating health outcomes and health and care systems within wider socio-political and economic structures, including colonialism, neoliberalism, and militarism.
Students explore the uneven distribution of the drivers and health impacts of global ecological change across populations and regions, and critically assess the role of health and care systems in mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. The course considers competing policy responses—from green growth and carbon pricing to degrowth, sufficiency, care economies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and alternative visions of resilience—asking what role health policy can and should play in shaping just and sustainable futures.
Objectives
Upon completion of the course, students should be able to:
- Critically analyse climate change and planetary health as socio-ecological processes shaped by power, inequality, and political economy.
- Apply a critical policy for health approach to assess how ecological, economic and health policies influence health outcomes and distributions.
- Evaluate the role of health and care systems in responding to ecological change through mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.
- Compare and critique competing ecological health policy frameworks and alternative futures from health and justice perspectives.
Instructors
Evaluation Breakdown
- Participation
- 10%
- Class facilitation (2 sessions)
- 20%
- Session commentaries (3 sessions)
- 30%
- Paper presentation
- 10%
- Final paper
- 30%