Africa Community of Planetary Partners for Health and Environment
The ACOPPHE project was started in late 2020, following a recognition that Planetary Health values and priorities can readily serve as an impactful, unifying, and welcoming space. We came together for the common purpose of connecting and mobilizing advocates for issues like health equity, sustainable development, child rights, and climate justice. Intentionally linking these issues that are directly tied to people, place, and planet facilitates the coordination of activities, harmonization of advocacy priorities, and sharing of ideas, opportunities, and solutions amongst likeminded advocates.
We mobilize to advance 3 primary objectives:
The opportunity to pursue and prioritize African-led and Africa-based solutions, leadership, and organizational development.
The importance of equitable community engagement that widely redistributes and harmoniously rebalances power and privilege in relationships and systems that significantly impact people and planet.
The need to center community members in activities, projects, and plans that affect their lives in a comprehensive way—this ensures that everyone can meet their basic needs, self-develop, serve as stewards of their lands and waters, pursue fulfilling livelihoods, and actualize their fundamental human rights.
Goals:
1. A fundamental ACOPPHE goal is to cultivate a diverse community of leaders and advocates who connect and integrate human health with environmental sustainability.
2. Our “Planetary Partnership” model for promoting international, intergenerational, and interspecies justice serves as the foundational platform for regular communication and partnerships between diverse individuals and groups – including academics, community members, and members from Indigenous communities.
Get in touch: [email protected]
CHIP: Child Health IS Planetary Health
Our CHIP team coalesced around our shared visions about the vital importance of simultaneously considering and prioritizing healthy children and a healthy planet. Although our initial terminology focused on “Planetary Pediatrics”, following a series of conversations that gave serious attention to the diverse global audience that we aim to meaningfully engage, we eventually arrived at more general and inclusive terminology that explicitly links children and planet.
Our target audience includes community members, advocates, and professionals who are interested in both learning about and improving Child Health and Planetary Health.
This expansive and synergistic frame enables us to strategically anticipate, accommodate, and incorporate the existing priorities of key stakeholders who are rigorously working to jointly advance environmental and health priorities.
Given our practice of linking Child Health with Child Development and Child Rights, our target audience also includes teachers, parents, and children themselves.
We further aspire to heal broken relationships – both within communities and between people and nature – while effectively reuniting people with nature and ensuring that every child has equitable access to a stable climate, supportive families and communities, resilient and thriving social and ecological systems, and a maximally healthy planet.
Our results include forming a complementary “Teachers For Planetary Health” network and an ongoing collaboration with Planetary Health Campus Ambassadors about an “ABC’s of Planetary Health” children’s book.
We are also mobilizing an International Society of Social Pediatrics and Child Health Planetary Pediatrics Working Group and co-hosting a Community Call with Clinicians For Planetary Health on Child and Planetary Health.
Get in touch: [email protected]