The Ethics, Climate Change and Health Mentorship Project

ECCH ABSTRACT According to a recent report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Latin America is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change (CC). Given the region’s susceptibility to CC, its pre-existing inequalities, and limited resources, it is essential that possible policies aiming to diminish the effects of CC in the region be enacted fairly. However, there is a total lack of local academic and policy literature on the subject of CC from an ethics point of view. With these major challenges in mind, the Ethics, Climate Change and Health (ECCH) Mentorship project aligns with CC-related goals from the United Nations, World Health Organization (WHO), and US National Institutes of Health to use mentor-trainee partnerships to train emerging scholars in analytical reflection on how best to frame and tackle problems of health equity in the region. We selected four such partnerships with scholars asking research questions related to ethics, CC and public health policy in Argentina, Peru, Costa Rica, and Mexico on topics related to oncology, water security, gerontology, and pediatrics. This one-year program will give trainees extensive contact with established literature and scholars working in the field of CC, a unique 1-on-1 opportunity to hone their English comprehension and communication skills and publish in Open Access journals, as well as participation in international congresses. Individual and collective activities are scheduled so as to help mentees achieve their training goals, in particular defending their Master’s thesis. Scientific and lay press publication aided by published multi-lingual academics will allow mentees to achieve their dissemination goals. In summary, it is hoped that rigorous training in ethics applied to local problems, with direct implications for policy and publishable results for leading journals, will strengthen the region’s resilience to CC. Finally, the project will also promote the bioethics and CC training capabilities of the FLACSO Program of Bioethics (parent award), a member of the Global Network of WHO Collaborating Centers for Bioethics.