Rose Gallagher, MBE (Professional Lead Sustainability, Royal College of Nursing) -Greening our profession
Summary
Join Rose Gallagher, a nurse specialized in infection prevention and control, as she guides you through an in-depth session on sustainable healthcare. Now leading a transformative initiative at the Royal College of Nursing, Rose presents crucial insights on sustainability from a nursing perspective. This session explores climate change in relation to weather and long-term climatic patterns. She explains the impact of exceeding planetary boundaries, leading to potential imbalances and risks to life on earth. The session also delves into the policy aspects of climate change, looking at key global agreements like the Paris Agreement. Learn the dire predictions provided by the World Economic Forum on future risks related to climate change and the significance of the Sustainable Development Goals. Despite being centered on nursing, this session holds relevance for all medical professions and presents an urgent call to action for sustainable healthcare.
Learning objectives
- Understand the difference between weather and climate, and the impact of climate change on both.
- Understand the concept of planetary boundaries and how exceeding these boundaries can disrupt balance and pose a risk to life on Earth.
- Learn about historical greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, and land use and their ties to population growth and longevity.
- Understand the policy aspects of climate change, particularly the 1.5 degree policy limit set by the Paris Agreement.
- Understand the alignment between the work of the nursing profession and the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 13 regarding climate action.
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Lovely, thank you. Hello everyone. It's lovely to be with you today. Thank you for um inviting me. My name is Rose Gallagher and I'm a nurse. I work at the Royal College of Nursing, my specialist area of practice um as a national lead for the college is actually in infection prevention and control. But as a consequence of doing that work and having dealt with reps and procurement issues over the years, I've made that natural transition into sustainability. Ok? Um So I'm currently on secondment at a college leading um what I hope is the beginning of a, a long term uh planned piece of work to support the nursing profession become more sustainable. So I'm going to talk through um a number of things in the next half hour. I know that you've had a presentation from Hugh this morning. I hope you're ok. Um I am gonna touch on a couple of bits that he talks about but not in the same way and apologies if you're not a nurse. This presentation is very much of a nursing perspective, but it is relative uh relevant to every everyone. I am gonna touch a little bit on mitigation and adaptation because that's something we really need to think about. Uh now, not just mitigating and trying to prevent um er more carbon and things getting uh i into our atmosphere and then I'll close with some of the bits that we're doing on sustainability and where I hope we're going to be going in the future. Most of our members are really passionate around climate change and the environmental aspects of trying to prevent um the worst of the effects of climate change. But I wanted to put this slide up because climate action is really only one element of sustainability as I'll come on and I'll show you um in a minute. But it's, it's a fantastic way to engage with our members and to encourage action. And it is absolutely a key part of our work on sustainability. But it's not the only part to our work if I go on to a little bit of myth busting, which um our last presenter um talked about this sort of sets the scene for me for, for where we are. So the first um sort of fun fact is that weather and climate are very different things. It's very easy to, to think about weather and climate as one and the same. But in fact, weather is very much a short term um effect caused by atmospheric conditions in a specific area at a moment in time. So you'll hear lots of people talk about extreme weather events um or challenge some of the assumptions around climate change because the weather is not as they expect it to be with a warming planet. But actually, when we talk about climate change, we're talking about long term climatic changes. So over 20 to 30 years, so those of you that are as old as me um will have the memory to notice the climatic changes that have happened in our lifetimes from being a child to where we are now. And those of you that are lucky enough to be young will see those happen uh in the future. The other um fun fact is is that the world is not warming uniformly. And in fact, here in the northern hemisphere, um the effects of climate change may actually mean that it gets colder in the northern hemisphere, not warmer. Um And across the world, people are seeing the effects of climate change in different ways. So it's not a one size fits all and climate and weather are different. This is just a visual image around how the temperatures have risen over time, uh reflecting that that warming planet and you can see here that uh temperatures are continuing to rise. So it's quite useful from a from a visual perspective to to see that. And I'm not sure if you touched touched on these, but this presentation is essentially all about balance. And the Stockholm Resilience Center um describes nine planetary boundaries that keep our world, our planet, um our climate in balance and we are now exceeding the majority of these planetary um boundaries. So with that comes significant risk of imbalance and risks not just to humans because we are just one species on this planet, but very much the the rest um of, of life as we know it um on earth and, and that, that balance, that comes with it as humans. There have been significant. Ok. Ok. As humans, we've made significant progress um in terms of improving health, reducing uh childhood mortality, treating illness, um et cetera, we've created, you know, huge scientific um advances and we've become more industrialized. And in the same way, I talked about balance. This is very much cause and effect here. So on the left hand side, this shows the grafts from the preindustrial era up up to round about where we are now in the two thousands. So you can see that as longevity has increased and more people have survived, our population has increased. But in order to do that, we need to use more energy, we need to use more water, we need to feed more people, for example. And the impact on on our earth systems which are in balance with us has also changed in the same way. So you can see on the top line there, some of the greenhouse gasses, um the surface temperature rising increases in ocean acidification, domesticated land use, tropical forest loss et cetera. So cause and effect and balance. And one of the last sort of fun facts if you could call, call them, that is really around the the policy aspects of climate change that is driving a lot of our sustainability work. So you'll all be familiar. I'm sure with the Paris Agreement in 2015, this year's cop is gonna be a really important cop top 30 in terms of looking at um how we meet current and future targets. But the 1.5 degree policy limit that was put in place with the Paris Agreement isn't a physical limit. So nothing is going to change on the day that people tell us that we've exceeded 1.5 degrees. It's a policy limit, not a, not a physical one. Um But what it means is that certainly as we approach and we've almost certainly reached 1.5 degrees. Now it becomes much more difficult to mitigate and adapt to the effects of a warming climate. 1.5 degrees was chosen because two was felt to be too, too risky. So 1.5 was the safe buffer zone. Um but it's going to be calculated over a number of years, sort of 10 to 20 years. So by the time officially, it comes out that we've met 1.5 degrees, we actually be nearer two degrees and it's not just health and health care that is taking the effects of climate change seriously this is a slide from the World Economic Forum. They published a big uh survey report in 2023 2024. And here these are world sort of global um economic leaders. They predict that in the next 10 years, four out of the top 10 major risks are going to be related to climate change. So this is something that the banks, industry manufacturers all really, really taking um seriously and health is really important from an economic perspective. You know, the economic value that nursing brings and health care brings to, to countries in terms of their, their economic output is very well described. So a sustainable world is something that we've been aspiring to meet. You've heard reference to a lot of the inequalities that exist, they exist globally uh in other countries, but they also exi er exist here in the United Kingdom and as nurses and with the Royal College of Nursing, we're trying to align the work that we do with the Sustainable Development Goals which every country uh that is a member of the United Nations has agreed that they will work towards with the aim of meeting these. And there is a sustainable development goal S TG 13 specifically on on climate action. But actually it runs