Are you a forward-thinker, a doer, a game-changer? Are you a future healthcare professional conscious of the threat the industry poses to the environment? Are you a responsible citizen of the world wanting to reduce the carbon footprint of hospitals? Are you longing for real action instead of green washing? This challenge is for you!
The Challenge: Creating an Eco-responsible Hospital
The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared that climate change is the greatest threat to global health in the 21st Century. Eco-responsibility is a major societal challenge that should be applied to all human activities.
The healthcare system has the responsibility to implement the Hippocratic oath “first, do no harm” yet its contribution to the carbon footprint of the world remains a major issue: in France, the healthcare industry alone produces 5-8% of green gas emissions, hence its functioning destroys the very thing it was built to protect: the environmental health of citizens. Conscious of this contradiction, the Paris Hospital Federation (APHP) and their partners are aiming for a greener hospital. Join them on the journey!
Whether it’s waste, water, energy, or data management, or still another challenge that remains unresolved, students signing up for this challenge will have the possibility to analyse existing issues with on-the-ground clinicians, departments heads and university professors specializing in healthcare and eco-responsible solutions, spot the challenge they wish to tackle, and provide sustainable solutions for the future generation of citizens, patients, and healthcare professionals as part of an international and interdisciplinary student team. Finally, their solutions will be assessed by an international panel of experts at the final event.
The ultimate goal of this challenge is to unite those who act in the healthcare system (healthcare professionals), those who use its services (patients), those who regulate its functioning (policymakers), those wish to invest into its future (private stakeholders) and the future generation of changemakers (students), independently from their academic background in order to provide sustainable and feasible solutions to this challenge that combines global health and climate change!
Find out more about the challenge and apply before 15 October!
The Challenger: Youth Advisory Council and the Learning Planet Institute
The Youth Advisory Council, supported by the Learning Planet Initiative, seeks to put the leadership and strategic decisions of the Council in the hands of the youth themselves. This was formed following an extensive selection process, with 120 youth applicants from 30 countries, reduced down to 18 council members, who have formed working groups on Health, Sustainability, Rights and Education. The Education group is composed of 5 young game-changers from the Philippines, Hong Kong, France, Vietnam and India, who are working to curate the knowledge emerging from Circle collaborations, projects and events. Council Members also co-designed, alongside the discussion on the Global Model UN at the #LearningPlanet festival, which gathered 150 youth worldwide in a 2-day conference on the future of Education SDG 4. This initiative is gathering momentum, with a follow-up session planned during Catalysing Change Week 2022. The #LearningPlanet Youth Fellows is a wider community of inspiring young individuals from around the world engaged in youth education, rights, well-being and health, and sustainability. This is the entry point for young individuals into the #LearningPlanet community, where they can be connected to emblematic partner events, training opportunities and moments to connect with fellow engaged youth.
The Learning Planet Institute, an NGO created in 2006 to support frontier research and education for life science, hosting one of the graduate schools of Université Paris Cité, with the unique feature of training at interdisciplinary interfaces. In 2021, this organisation has become a driver of the learning-society revolution worldwide that believes learning, research, collective intelligence, and creativity can help both individuals and organisations adapt to the increasingly complex challenges of our rapidly changing world. Besides being a research-development and education centre, LPI offers services to government agencies, companies, and other types of organisations as they embark on their learning-society transformation.
UNESCO gave to the Learning Planet Institute the mission to gather players from around the world in order to identify, celebrate, enhance and scale up innovative educational solutions towards sustainable futures. The Youth Advisory Council was built under this later. It will be involved by and through this mission.