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SHARE 2023 | Dr Teddie Potter | University of Minnesota, United States

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Summary

This on-demand teaching session is perfect for medical professionals looking to gain an understanding of planetary health and the impacts of climate change on human health. Doctor Teddy Potter, a clinical professor from the School of Nursing University of Minnesota, will be examining the collapse of the earth's natural systems, the five domains of planetary health, and the sustainable mission. In addition, to honor International Day of Nursing Nurses, the talk will include opportunities to be involved in planetary health, explore how human overpopulation is affecting the planet’s resources, and discussions on implementing the Planetary Health Education Framework. Don't miss this chance to learn from a leading expert on planetary health, sustainability, and human health!

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Description

Dr. Teddie Potter is a Clinical Professor and the Director of Planetary Health at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing. She is a Fellow in the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Coordinating Committee of Columbia University's Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education. She is also a member of the American Academy of Nursing Environment and Public Health Expert Panel and the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments.

Dr. Potter is deeply committed to climate change education and advocacy. She co-founded Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate and chairs the Planetary Health Alliance's Clinicians for Planetary Health. She has also designed and co-taught an interdisciplinary course titled “The Global Climate Challenge: Creating an Empowered Movement for Change.”

Learning objectives

Learning Objectives:

  1. Recognize the role of human consumption in disrupting natural systems and causing climate change
  2. Understand the current forecasts for global climate change and the health risks associated with them
  3. Appreciate the importance of trans-disciplinary collaboration and collective action to tackle the challenges associated with planetary health
  4. Analyze current and emerging evidence-based interventions to address planetary health issues
  5. Describe how Florence Nightingale's writings and belief in preventative care still bear relevance today in the fight for planetary health.
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Computer generated transcript

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The following transcript was generated automatically from the content and has not been checked or corrected manually.

And we're now ready for our final keynote speaker of the day. And we're very privileged all the way from America to have Doctor Teddy Potter who is a clinical professor from the School of Nursing University of Minnesota, as well as the Director of Planetary Health. Doctor Potter is deeply committed to climate change and planetary health education, including membership and the alliance of Nurses for healthy environments and membership on the American Academy of Nursing Environment and public health expert panel. She had just lost your audio there. Oh, can you not hear me? Sorry. Everyone would just be a minute or two while it looks like Heather just gets back online. Won't be a second. I think she had a couple of issues. Yeah, I think she's been baited out. Yeah, I think I can see that now. Yeah. Okay. And are you able to hear me? We are. Yeah, something going on with my microphone. So I shall go back. Were you able to hear the bio that I was reading just a little bit? Just the first two cents in October? Um That's okay. Heather, I'm fine being Teddy showing. All right. Well, it's just it looks like we're having difficulties with Heather's Michael Frayn. Um, so unfortunately, have your bio in front of me, Teddy, but perhaps we can hand Davis yourself and you're able to give us that little bit of background in terms of where you're speaking from today. So like to just invite you to start sharing your slides and away. We go. Thank you. Absolutely. So, my name is Teddy Potter. I'm Clinical professor at the School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota where I'm honored to be the first Director of Planetary Health. And that brings me to your door today and it's very nice to be joining you um from Minnesota. So, um I really want to be focused today on talking about planetary health as part of the sustainability mission and um the direction that we're going, I'm going, I'm going to be talking about um the collapse of the earth's natural systems and the impact on a human ecosystem and health, looking at the five domains of planetary health and some opportunities for us to be involved. But I couldn't be speaking from uh to a group from England without mentioning uh Florence Nightingale, this is her birthday. And so it's the International Day of Nursing Nurses today. And so it's very um much my honor to be speaking with all of you on this day. A little bit about myself as a child. I would spend most of my time out in nature when you're outside that long. Um, you begin to see connections and patterns and that's one of the beauties of nature, whether you're hiking or camping or canoeing. The patterns are just spectacular but I began to understand that something was happening and that I was part of those patterns but the patterns were being disrupted. One of my favorite quotes is by Doctor Martin Luther King Jr who talks about these patterns were all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied into a single garment of destiny, whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. And that is exactly right. So given my love of patterns, I began to recognize in the late 19 nineties, early two thousands that are patterns were changing in Minnesota. The ice was coming in much, much later and we were falling a lot because we're used to skating on ice. We're not used to in between whether where there's a lot of ice on the sidewalk. Our birds were migrating at different times. In fact, the Robin who was always the first sign of spring never left the winter, it never flew away. And so something was really wrong are flowers were arriving at different times. And that's what got me involved in looking at climate change and the other issues I wanted to know why these beloved threads of connection, this web of life that I've always loved. Why were these threads breaking? What was happening? So I got into my metaphorical canoe and paddled upstream. Nurses think upstream, if we see something going wrong, we go way upstream to figure out why it's happened. We don't just stay at correcting the problem as we see it now and reacting to the problem. We want to intervene to prevent as much suffering as possible. So I had an inkling that these disruptions of patterns were going to have massive impacts on human health. So I wanted to figure out what was going on. Part of it is that our species are animal species, human species are population has gone basically unchecked. We um did pretty well. We were pretty stable and in line with the ecosystem until the start um burning of fossil fuels in the industrial revolution in the 18 hundreds and then our species um just skyrocketed, skyrocketed. Our population did. And um it's not that, you know, more humans is all bad. Um We have, it's our consumption patterns. We have patterns of consumption that are driving the earth system towards extinction. In that we are using um up our resources faster than the earth can replenish them. If you look at earth overshoot day, it's the day of the year when we hit the point where we've used our earth's allocation of of um renewable resources. The last time we were in balance when we used the year's worth of resources in a year's time was in 1970. Also happens to be the year that the Earth Day um celebration was started 50 years ago. Now we're using up the earth's resources right around August. And we would um are using about 1.6 earth's to support our current pattern of consumption. Now, that is a problem and not sustainable. And all of these lifestyle choices and who we are as a species are impacting the survival of humans and other species were clearing for us at an alarming rate. Our biodiversity loss loss is 1000 times normal. So there's a normal pattern of biodiversity loss where 1000 times that were causing a mass extinction, oceans Acidifying land is becoming desert soil, air and water pollution. Um micro plastics just last year, we discovered that micro plastics were showing up in the placenta of humans that can't be good. We're not quite sure longitudinally what it's going to do to us, but that just can't be good to have micro plastics circulating around our bloodstream. These extreme weather events, temperatures are increasing and um we're having sea level rises. So all of this has impacts just to show you in Europe. This is a real visual um point of seeing in colors, what the temperature is doing across Europe and to bring us back to plastics. Here we are showing where the plastics are circulating in our oceans. So humans are messing up our ecosystem in massive ways and all of these ways in um had lead to human health implications, not in the future. Not 100 years from now right now though, happening right now. And we need to get involved. For example, this is my family album from this summer. My son, um, uh, was bit by a deer tick, uh, in upper state New York and he got Lyme's disease. Then he moved back here and he was bit by another deer tick here in Minnesota and got Lyme's disease. Again, this lower left hand corner is my, the chubby legs and my little grandson who got a bit, um, by Lyme, a deer tick up in northern Minnesota and then my daughter who is pregnant at the time, I got bit by a deer tick at a park in our urban area. This is highly unusual and this is what's happening around the world. These vectored changes and changes in the human, uh, our relationship with the ecosystem. Half the world's people live within 40 miles of a coast. This is another huge issue and, um, take a peek right here as you're probably sitting or if you're on online, take a peek at this. Think about what's along the Thames. What do you see what buildings, what organizations, which hospitals are located in those floodplain areas? If we reach one 0.5, the blue areas are underwater. If we reach, um, a higher 3.0 degrees, centigrade change, all the orange areas will be underwater. This is not acceptable. We now understand if we admit we are committing to this future and we are expecting a mass migration all over the world. 216 million people on the move by 2050. We're certainly seeing that at the border of the United States right now, the southern border of mass migration, some of it, it's related to economic struggles, but the economic struggles are oftentimes related to um uh the land being not arable anymore. Uh They can't, they can't raise crops and um they uh they have to be on the move for survival. The 2019 lancet countdown um executive summary, set it this way. The life of every child born today will be profoundly affected by climate change. With populations around the world increasingly facing extremes of weather, food and water insecurity, changing patterns of infectious disease and a less certain future. Without accelerated intervention, this new era will come to define the health of people at every stage of their lives. That means every single health professional. This listening today, we will be dealing with this. We will be caring for people and communities who will be um suffering uh the impact of these environmental degradations more recently. Um The U N General Secretary said this at the opening of the COP uh conference in Egypt last November. We are in the fight of our lives and we're losing greenhouse gas emissions. Keep growing global temperatures keep rising. And our plan plan, it is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos, irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the Accelerator Humanity has a choice, cooperate or perish. It's either a climate solidarity packed or a collective suicide pact that is very dire but very accurate. So in the words of Great Timberg, the iconic Swedish climate activist, we can't save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to be changed, everything needs to change and it has to start today. So take a deep breath, that's just not easy to hear. But as health professionals, we often face things that are not easy to here, we face to face diagnoses that are life threatening. It is time for us to open our ears, hear the diagnosis and plan on how we're going to respond. And I'd like to introduce you to planet are health which offers the best response that I know of. So planetary health is a solutions oriented. That's really nice. Don't want to just be problem focused, trans disciplinary field and social movement focused on analyzing and addressing the impacts of human disruptions to earth's natural systems on human health and all life on the planet. You might be more familiar with public health echo Health, Global Health One Health and of course, the U N Sustainable Development Goals, all of those can be nested under planetary health. So this is not a time for competition or a time that one is better than the other it's a time to come together under the general umbrella of Planetary Health and find each other and work together a couple of documents that I want to share with you that I think will be very uh useful. One is the planetary health education framework. This brought leaders um and um educators from all of the world in different disciplines together to say, how are we going to teach our higher education students about Planetary Health? We started out with over 500 things we wanted to have in the curriculum. And as you know, there is not room in our curriculum for 500 talking points. So we finally got it down to five quarter means that we want every single student in every discipline around the globe to come out with this shared language. So they can, they can talk to one another, so nurses can talk to the people in agriculture and engineers and come together for the solutions that we need to co co create. The first domain is interconnection within nature. This is not reconnecting humans to nature. This is helping us understand the humans and nature are intimately connected. There is no separation, there has never been a separation. We've always been connected and anything we do to nature pollution, um causing a mass extraction issues, cutting the for us we are doing to ourselves and our future, we have to understand the Anthropocene and health, the humans are causing this, this is not going to be solved by technology or um just uh uh figuring out um solutions that we have to purchase. This is going to happen when we change our behaviors and the ways we react um and interact with the rest of the ecosystem and our priorities, prioritization of future generations, making decisions for future generations. We need to be making sure our solutions are deeply grounded in equity and social justice that um we understand systems try to understand how systems work and the complexity of systems so that we do not aren't blindsided by unintended consequences. And so we can pull the biggest levers when we see them. We also need to teach our students how to build movements and create change. The second document I want to um share with you is called the Seppala Declaration of Planetary Health. This was released in 2021 at the Planetary Hair Excusing Planetary Health Annual meeting um which was scheduled for South Paulo, but we had to do it virtual and this is what the Psa Pollo Declaration says. It's a crowd sourced document. The global community came together to draft this document. We need a fundamental shift in how we live on earth. What we're calling the great transition. Achieving the great transition will we will require rapid and deep structural changes across most dimensions of human activity we need in this great transition to address how we produce and consume few food, how we produce in manufacture products and energy, how we construct our cities and live in our cities and even the stories that we tell ourselves. It's going to, it's a call for massive innovation and collaboration across disciplines and across sectors. So instead of being in despair and isn't this an awful moment? I think what a wonderful moment to co create a society that works on behalf of all people. This is what the the global community calls for health professionals to do to reorient towards disease, profession, prevention and health promotion. Moving away from our current illness care system to a true healthcare and health promotion system, incorporating health perspectives from uh indigenous communities as well as other traditional knowledge systems. Um making sure that people have access to green space as a as a form of are restoring and renewing our health nutritious diets and that health care for all is a human, right? So in the United States, just talk briefly about how we're doing this. We're doing things we're really focusing on d carbon izing the US health sector. So a lot of work is going into looking at our footprint in the United States, we create 8.5% of our greenhouse gas emissions. Healthcare does that. That's crazy. On the one hand, we're called to do no harm and to preserve life. On the other hand, we're creating greenhouse gasses that are contributing to illness and early death. This is not acceptable healthcare. Um professionals around the nation are being called to intervene. An example. Another example from nursing is we have worked with project drawdown to promote solutions through nursing to our patient's and our nursing community. We've chosen five solutions from draw the drawdown sciences, planting trees and protecting our forests, play plant based diets, educating girls like a walkable bike, herbal cities and renewable energy. We are encouraging the 27 7 million nurses and midwives in the world. We are encouraging people to take up these actions. So we have solutions. We know what to do. We know what's going wrong and it is time to act. The decision is ours. Which future do we want? Um for the generations that follow, this is my grandson. Every time I hold him in my lap and read them a story. I am thinking about how I can work with all of you to make sure that his future as is bright and that he can flourish as can all of our Children around the world. Thank you very much and I look forward to your questions and uh I'm just coming back home. Sorry. Um I'm just coming back in here. Have you just finished teddy? I have just finished okay of all days. My internet's really playing up. I've just lost internet about three times during the presentation. I'm so sorry. I know how that feels and but you were saying something about nurses always thinking upstream and you know about troubleshooting. So, you know, I've just gone to another device enjoying this way, which was making some horrible feedback. But um I'm on my phone now, so hopefully this is more reliable. Um Thank you so much. I'm just going to look to the chat because we've got some time for questions and comments and bear with me because um while you're doing that, I want to give a shout out to all of you in the UK. Um we follow what you're doing. You really are leaders in many ways. And I want you to know that even though it can feel slow and daunting your actions and the steps that you are taking are being observed and we are teaching what you're doing and hoping that they'll inspire our policy makers and our pharmaceutical may sugars and our health professionals. So I just want to do a huge shout out for all that you're doing and um celebrate you today. Uh Well, and the theme of this year's conferences around teamwork into this plan area and you know, likewise and you know, all of your work over the years um has been inspiring for us as well. So um I guess this is what all of us learning from each other. And I don't know if you're able to catch some of the other keynotes um or sessions today, but it's been a really international mix and yeah, we're all trying to do the same thing and much better to collectively do it together, isn't it? So I'm going to ask, I'm gonna ask Allison Allison, are you able to turn your microphone on in camera? And um I'm struggling to look at the chat and this, at the same time, I can't find the chat, I can see it, but then I can't see what else is going on. And I think it's easier. Uh Could you facilitate some questions and comments from the? Thank you. Well, lots of people being very, very positive for the first thing. So Tim's post a link to the South Pile of Declaration of Planetary Health. Have a look at and also the lancet um uh um Declaration. Oh yeah, same, same link I think. Um Yeah, amazing, brilliant, inspiring, sobering and inspirational interspersed with Happy nurses' Day. Yeah, people are very inspired. Um And, and also really appreciating the sense of personal responsibility that came in to talk to Jesus says it's all our responsibility to enact changes in our own lives as well as educate public. I see a question from James and I can answer it. Um Thank you James for, for um engaging. I appreciate that. Um So for those of you that might not have it pulled up. Just how is the potential health message received when I'm talking with health professionals and leaders who are new to the subject? Unfortunately, in the United States, um climate change got um politicized very early and so people just turned off as soon as you mentioned, climate changes, like I am not going there. So we have found, um, I've been delighted that people have been able to understand and grass planetary health and not go down the partisan, you know, whole and so they, people know that things are changing. They might not, might not know why it's changing and they might not know exactly the science's behind it, but they know something's wrong. Something is dreadfully wrong. We're seeing it in all are in all our areas. And so when we bring it up as a solutions oriented, um, it, it perks people up. We also remind people this is not new. We teach people and teach patient's about seat belts. We teach them about putting helmets on now that it's bicycle season. And so we now need to teach our patient's about when wildfires are burning. Um, how do you check for the air quality in your area? And how do you protect yourself? How do you protect your family, especially vulnerable members, Children and elders and pregnant people. Um, during very hot times, what is your plan? Um, as far as polling centers is the place you can go when things get extremely hot? Are there places? And I'm planned when three things get really cold because we have polar vortexes in Minnesota and it can dip below gas 30 F, which is pretty darn cold. So how do we protect people especially are outside workers. Um who are, you know, we work out outdoors for a living. How do we protect um marginalized communities, communities who are already under resourced and most at risk? So health professionals get it then. Um we did a big study in Minnesota and asked um over 6000 health professionals, do you think climate change is real? Yes, it is. Do you think it's happening now? Absolutely. Are you seeing your patient's manifest with problems related to climate change? Absolutely. Um Do you think it's the role of the health professional to talk to them about climate change? Yes, we do. So what keeps you from doing doing it? We thought it was gonna be lack of time or you don't get paid to do it. In fact, it was health professionals don't know where to start and don't know the topic well enough. So that gave us the power to create um slide decks and information to get out to every single practicing health professional on. How are you going to help people live through this in the school of nursing? We've embedded into all levels of our curriculum. It's not an elective, it's not an honor student course. Every single graduate is gonna graduate, being prepared to help citizens deal with the changes that are occurring. Long answer for a great question. Thank you. And actually, um today I'm thinking about some of the meetings I've been on with you and developing the plan to health report card and how much, you know, students are really leading the way on this as well and this sort of collaborative partnership. Um And certainly the we started off today a now announcing that there'd be a new category this year with the Plantar health report card. Um students having the opportunity to do a specific poster category, but it's, it's just really inspiring uh you know, working with students And we've certainly found that at the University of right. And that um I mean, any projects always better when you're clever, did well with students. But it's, it's just been, I think things haven't really moved forward um even more so because of that. Absolutely. And I want to thank you for your leadership in that area because that's a lever. We can pull the report cards. And I oftentimes tease my medical colleagues in the school medicine of school nurse and got an a for the second year in a row. Did you check this year? You're getting a c not that it's a competition, right? Uh competition, but it does get dean's moving when they realize their score is not very high. Uh Tim Malone asked a great question and I really want to address that and that is how bout of these unnatural systems? Absolutely. That's why we have complexity and system thinking as part of the domains of planet, your health and that we need to understand that you cannot restore the health of the natural ecosystem when our economic models are so flawed. And so recently, I've been hearing more and more about commercial determinants of health, not just social determinants of health and environmental determinants of health, but commercial determinants of health. And I think that's going to give health professionals some wonderful talking points on how to move ahead. Critiquing are models that, that promote the destruction of our planet. It's a great question. Thank you. There's one more question from Joanna, who's one of our phd students here at the University of Brighton? Actually, the School Spartan Health Sciences. Are you able to see that question, Teddy? I am and Joanna, congratulations. I'm pursuing your phd. We need people like you who are um going to be asking these key questions and generating knowledge that we can teach. So um I'm just thrilled. So um what's uh oh boy, these are big questions. So what's the most difficult to accomplish to becoming sustainable society? Uh sustainable society? It's um to conquer despair. That's the biggest challenge. People will often times say I'm one person, what can I do? So we really have to combat with that with a narrative that says you're one person, but you can meet the other people that are next to you like in this circle and start to work together and we can transform things. Do I think younger generations are listening compared with older generations? Uh It depends on which older person you're talking to. Obviously, I it's caught on with me. So, um, I think a lot of our older generation is starting to say, um, we want to preserve the planet for our Children and our grandchildren. We have to get active younger generation. Absolutely. They grew up being fed on information about climate change and other environmental issues. But unfortunately, they come in with, also, my experience is a lot of them come in with despair of, you know, we're headed towards extinction. There's nothing that we can do. So we have to work really hard to ensure that. Of course, there's things we can do and especially nurses, we always say there's more we can do when we and somebody here's, there's nothing more I can do. You have cancer, there's nothing more I can do and nurses go, of course, there's things we can do, we can keep you comfortable comfortable, we can help you adapt. It's the same thing with the planet right now. There are things we can do to mitigate these issues, but we also need to be helping people adapt. So it's all hands on deck moment time to to empower the young generation with movement building and work together across the generations to make this happen a better future for everyone. Okay. And um just let's take um there's a few more comments that I'll leave you to read those tiny, but just a really big. Thank you for your contribution and our final keynotes um talk today and I look forward to hopefully will be at a future collaborations. I'm sure in the many groups that were in and are overlapping and um the recordings and all of the content from today will be made available afterwards. So we'll make sure that you get the link and if that's useful for you and your students and um colleagues as well. So thank you very much again. So we'll just thank everybody again for such a fun.