This course covers the basic Public Health aspects of climate change and its impact on populations. It aims to inform about the dangers of climate change to Public Health and spur us into action. 

The course is designed to help you: 

• Understand the key historical and projected estimates of climate change, and the human influence on climate change.
• Understand the magnitude of the potential health problems for your local, national, and global populations from climate change, and advise on the implementation of improved data collection and accuracy (numerator and denominator), as well as explore and analyze the potential Public Health benefits of addressing climate change.
• Understand how the health impacts of climate change relate to the ecosystem and environmental sustainability.
• Identify the key issues which must be addressed when developing policy options and understand the main global players and influences.
• Debate the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of potential interventions to reduce the Public Health impact of climate change in your setting.

This course is an Open Access Course. It has been adopted from Peoples-uni and was further developed by NextGenU.org (NGU).

There are five (5) modules to complete, which include:

Module 1: Introduction to Climate Change
Module 2: Climate Change and Human Health
Module 3: Climate Change in the Context of Environmental Sustainability
Module 4: Climate Change, Policy and Politics
Module 5: What Can We Do About Climate Change?

Approximate time for completion of this course is 9 hours at an average reading rate of 144 words/minute.

Engaging with this course

• To register for this course, complete the registration form. Begin the course with Module 1. For each lesson, read the description. 
• Each topic comprises introductory remarks. You can click on the collections of resources in each section. 
• There is a forum on each topic for reflection, and you will be able to add a new topic or respond to a previous one. You may want to share your learning from this and other readings, comment on the topics from your own experience, comment on others' posts, or provide feedback on how we can improve the content and/or presentation.
• There is a final quiz to assess your understanding of some important concepts. Click on the hyperlinks to take you to these items in each topic.

Requirements to obtain the certificate 

You may browse this course for free to learn for your personal enrichment. There are no requirements.

To obtain a certificate, a learner must successfully complete:

• All reading requirements
• All discussion forums
• The final exam with a minimum of 80% and a maximum of 3 attempts, and
• The self and course evaluation forms
  
  

This course has been included in the list of activities available for continuing education for Certified Public Health Professionals by the National Board of Public Health Examiners.

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Headline Competence (Learning Outcome): After completing this Module, you should be able to:

Understand the key historical and projected estimates of climate change, and the human influence on climate change.

Before exploring the resources, you might want to look at this short video from NASA (Published on Jan 20, 2016). This visualization illustrates Earth’s long-term warming trend, showing temperature changes from 1880 to 2015 as a rolling five-year average. Orange colors represent temperatures that are warmer than the 1951-80 baseline average, while blues represent temperatures cooler than the baseline.

Headline Competence (Learning Outcome): After completing this Module, you should be able to:

Understand the magnitude of the potential health problems for your local, national, and global populations from climate change, and be able to advise on the implementation of improved data collection and accuracy (numerator and denominator), as well as explore and analyze the potential Public Health benefits of addressing climate change.

Look at this short video from the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change. It is an excellent introduction to the topic.

Headline Competence (Learning Outcome): After completing this Module, you should be able to: 

Understand how the health impacts of climate change relate to the ecosystem and environmental sustainability.

Before exploring the resources below, you might like to look at this short video "Welcome to the Anthropocene."

From the Welcome to the Anthropocene Educational Web Portal

Headline Competence (Learning Outcome): After completing this Module, you should be able to:

Identify the key issues which must be addressed when developing policy options and understand the main global players and influences.

Headline Competence (Learning Outcome): After completing this Module, you should be able to:

Debate the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of potential interventions to reduce the Public Health impact of climate change in your setting.

Bear in mind the headline comment from a 2014 report by 18 prestigious scientists:

"In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilisation. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us". (Blue Planet Synthesis paper for UNEP)

To take the final exam, you must complete all quizzes and complete all the required activities. 

To access the exam, click on the name of the exam provided above. On the following screen, click the Attempt Quiz button to respond to the questions.

In this section, you can provide feedback about this course to help us make NextGenU.org better. Once evaluations are completed, you will be able to download your certificate of completion.