An Australian glossary to aid multisectoral research and collaborations to address health and climate change

Breth‐Petersen, Matilde; Rychetnik, Lucie; Barratt, Alexandra L; Zhang, Ying

doi:10.5694/mja2.51161

Topics

A shared language will promote climate change and health research and underpin a sustainable future

Climate change requires collective action across many government, non‐government and private sectors.1 The development of a shared terminology to conduct, share and use research will be critical to the effective communication and collaboration needed to achieve this collective action.2 At the same time, climate change mitigation and adaptation is an exponentially growing field of multidisciplinary research and practice, augmenting the scale of the challenge.3,4 It will be vital that this cross‐disciplinary research effort is supported, but currently, there is poor alignment in the use of relevant terms across different research and policy fields, with little standardisation of terminology in the national and international literature.

1 University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW
2 Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, Sax Institute, Sydney, NSW

Correspondence: ying.zhang@sydney.edu.au

Acknowledgements:

This project has been supported by the New South Wales Government Department of Planning, Industry and Environment. The funding agency did not play any role in the study and publication, except for providing financial support. We thank the contribution from the project advisors: Fiona Armstrong, Executive Director, Climate and Health Alliance; Paul Beggs, Co‐chair, MJA–Lancet Countdown, Macquarie University; Sinead Boylan, University of Sydney, Human Health and Social Impacts (HHSI) node coordinator; Neil Hime, Senior Policy Analyst, Environmental Health Branch, Health Protection NSW; Lee Huuskes, Senior Scientist, Social Research, NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment; Lynne Madden, University of Notre Dame Australia; and Geoffrey Morgan, University of Sydney, HHSI node lead. We also thank all the stakeholder engagement process participants who contributed to the online survey, the online workshop and the project discussion paper.

Competing interests:

No relevant disclosures.

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