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Physicians play an important role in adapting to and mitigating the adverse health effects of the unfolding climate and ecological crises. To fully harness this potential, future physicians need to acquire knowledge, values, skills, and leadership attributes to care for patients presenting with environmental change-related conditions and to initiate and propel transformative change in healthcare and other sectors of society including, but not limited to, the decarbonization of healthcare systems, the transition to renewable energies and the transformation of transport and food systems. Despite the potential of Planetary Health Education (PHE) to support medical students in becoming agents of change, best-practice examples of mainstreaming PHE in medical curricula remain scarce both in Germany and internationally. The process of revising and updating the Medical Licensing Regulations and the National Competency-based Catalog of Learning Objectives for Medical Education in Germany provided a window of opportunity to address this implementation challenge. In this article, we describe the development and content of national Planetary Health learning objectives for Germany. We anticipate that the learning objectives will stimulate the development and implementation of innovative Planetary Health teaching, learning and exam formats in medical schools and inform similar initiatives in other health professions. The availability of Planetary Health learning objectives in other countries will provide opportunities for cross-country and interdisciplinary exchange of experiences and validation of content, thus supporting the consolidation of Planetary Health learning objectives and the improvement of PHE for all health professionals globally.
Satellite-derived land surface temperature dynamics in the context of global change — a review
(2023)
Satellite-derived Land Surface Temperature (LST) dynamics have been increasingly used to study various geophysical processes. This review provides an extensive overview of the applications of LST in the context of global change. By filtering a selection of relevant keywords, a total of 164 articles from 14 international journals published during the last two decades were analyzed based on study location, research topic, applied sensor, spatio-temporal resolution and scale and employed analysis methods. It was revealed that China and the USA were the most studied countries and those that had the most first author affiliations. The most prominent research topic was the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI), while the research topics related to climate change were underrepresented. MODIS was by far the most used sensor system, followed by Landsat. A relatively small number of studies analyzed LST dynamics on a global or continental scale. The extensive use of MODIS highly determined the study periods: A majority of the studies started around the year 2000 and thus had a study period shorter than 25 years. The following suggestions were made to increase the utilization of LST time series in climate research: The prolongation of the time series by, e.g., using AVHRR LST, the better representation of LST under clouds, the comparison of LST to traditional climate change measures, such as air temperature and reanalysis variables, and the extension of the validation to heterogenous sites.
Aim: The climate and ecological crises are considered fundamental threats to human health. Healthcare workers in general and doctors in particular can contribute as change agents in mitigation and adaptation. Planetary health education (PHE) aims to harness this potential. This study explores perspectives among stakeholders involved in PHE at German medical schools on the characteristics of high-quality PHE and compares them to existing PHE frameworks.
Methods: In 2021, we conducted a qualitative interview study with stakeholders from German medical schools involved in PHE. Three different groups were eligible: faculty members, medical students actively involved in PHE, and study deans of medical schools. Recruitment was performed through national PHE networks and snowball sampling. Thematic qualitative text analysis according to Kuckartz was used for the analysis. Results were systematically compared to three existing PHE frameworks.
Results: A total of 20 participants (13 female) from 15 different medical schools were interviewed. Participants covered a wide range of professional backgrounds and experience in PHE education. The analysis revealed ten key themes: (1) Complexity and systems thinking, (2) inter- and transdisciplinarity, (3) ethical dimension, (4) responsibility of health professionals, (5) transformative competencies including practical skills, (6) space for reflection and resilience building, (7) special role of students, (8) need for curricular integration, (9) innovative and proven didactic methods, and (10) education as a driver of innovation. Six of our themes showed substantial overlap with existing PHE frameworks. Two of our themes were only mentioned in one of the frameworks, and two others were not explicitly mentioned. Few important elements of the frameworks did not emerge from our data.
Conclusions: In the light of increased attention regarding the connections of the climate and ecological crises and health, our results can be useful for anyone working toward the integration of planetary health into medical schools' and any health professions' curricula and should be considered when designing and implementing new educational activities.