Co-design in climate and health research
This policy brief summarises collaborative activities and lessons learned from Climate, Environment, and Health (CEH) projects. The featured projects focus on worker's health, infectious disease control and early warning, nutrition, maternal health, and local community collaborations. Co-design involves everyone working together from conceptualisation to design, through implementation to dissemination and communication of research findings.
Key messages from the brief include:
- Research projects need to be funded for longer periods to build and maintain relationships between researchers and stakeholders in order to develop meaningful evidence for policy
- Co-design can be locally led; funders can review need for travel, with consideration of the social and environmental costs and benefits from balancing travel and remote work
- Accept critiquing approaches in proposals
- Encourage proposals where objectives are defined by local communities
- Revise measures of success for research projects that include communities
- Provide funding mechanisms and build pathways for the translation of successful research into practice
- Consider compensating communities for their time spent co-designing
- Fund projects with potential to scale up through new partnerships
- Use co-design to provide inroads to adaptation and mitigation actions in real world contexts