Developing Climate and Health Systems Maps for Building Shared Understanding and Identifying Priority Action

Save the Children worked with KnowlEdge Srl and country stakeholders in Colombia, Somalia, and Vietnam to develop systems-based mapping tools to understand climate and health interconnections as well as feedback relationships, which could amplify adverse impacts on health in their country contexts. Colombia focused on climate change and food insecurity; Somalia focused on drought and malnutrition; and Vietnam focused on climate and dengue transmission risk. In these resource-constrained settings, developing the mapping tool was foundational to building a shared understanding of the multisectoral impacts of—and connections between—human activities, climate change, and health, including social determinants. Building systems maps is effective for active participatory engagement to co-create understanding of climate-health relationships as a basis for identifying action. It can be done at multiple scales using systems thinking (ST)-applied methodology.