A new group of Caribbean scholars applied to and were accepted into The CREEi-Hastings Center Climate Bioethics Program (CBP) in October 2023. They have since attended a series of live virtual seminars led by CBP faculty experts including Marina Romanello, Executive Director of the Lancet Countdown on the health impacts of climate change, and prominent bioethicists James Dwyer and Dale Jamieson whose work addresses climate change and health. During this time, individual mentors were matched with each of the 9 scholars based on their interest and native language. The 5 Spanish-speaking scholars and 4 English-speaking scholars are developing essays on climate change and health (CCH) topics relevant to their own institutions, countries, and the wider Caribbean basin.
In March 2024, these scholars and mentors attended an intensive in-person workshop in their native language during which they presented and critiqued each other’s work and further developed their essays. They will participate in a 3-day virtual workshop in June during which they will interact with invited regional speakers and guests about regional responses to the health impacts of climate change. This workshop will be the first such event to explicitly incorporate bioethics within discussions of CCH in the Caribbean and aims to foster multidisciplinary and trans-sectoral CCH collaboration. This is important because the ethical dimensions of climate change mitigation and resilience are crucial to identifying and addressing reasons that can garner public. This is important because the ethical dimensions of climate change mitigation and resilience are crucial to identifying and addressing reasons for garnering public support, prioritizing needs and resources, ensuring equitable distribution of benefits and burdens of climate responses, and respecting the perspectives of those are who are affected by CCH and CCH responses.
Those who complete the CBP program will be positioned to integrate bioethics and CCH into their teaching, gain traction as equal partners in international CCH research, become collaborators and co-authors in trans-disciplinary CCH research and public health interventions, and ultimately improve health equity in the Caribbean region. This region has unique vulnerability to climate change due to its diverse geography (small island developing states and other low-lying countries with relatively large coastlines) and socioeconomic status as low- and middle- income countries (LMICs). Work by these scholars will expand the voice and representation of Caribbean SIDS and LMICs in global CCH and bioethics research.
The CBP was patterned after the successful Bioethics Scholars Program (BSP) which was a model educational program for advancing critical thinking and writing skills of professionals from LMICs of the Caribbean basin in English and Spanish languages. Like the BSP, essays produced by CBP scholars will be compiled into a compendium made publicly accessible on the websites of The Hastings Center and others where it will serve as an educational resource in both languages. The CBP is a partnership between CREEi partner institutions (WINDREF, SGU, Clarkson University, and Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro) and The Hastings Center which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan bioethics research institute https://www.thehastingscenter.org/.
The CBP is supported by NIH-FIC Award number 3R25TW 009731-11S1 (Administrative supplement to the Caribbean Research Ethics Education initiative (CREEi) for the period September 2023 for one year.
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