Climate Change Adaptation and Societal Transformation: What Are the Public Health Challenges?

Abstract

Behavioural change with societal transformation has been the key processes whereby hand and respiratory hygiene, social distancing and self-isolation that citizens across the world have been asked to implement to respond to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Is it possible to use such societal transformation approaches to change our behaviour for climate change adaptation? The European Commission (EC) funded research and innovation programmes that will be launched from 2021 will mobilise investment and EC’s wide efforts to achieve measurable and time-bound goals on issues that affect citizens’ daily lives. These programmes are based around five missions, one of which is the Mission on Adaptation to climate change including societal transformation. This will provide an opportunity to build evidence-informed assessment and design of interventions and should use a systems approach to determine and deploy the most cost-effective mix of public health behaviour change policy options according to the Nuffield Intervention Ladder and the Behaviour Change Wheel. This will maximise the likelihood of delivering societal transformation actions through ambitious but realistic research and innovation activities to help deliver planetary health programmes for Europe more widely.