News
September 17, 2021
Call for Manuscript Contributions for the Special Issue "Planetary Health and Climate Medicine" of the GMS Journal for Medical Education
According to the "Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change" [1], the future health status of our world population essentially depends on the development of man-made global warming [2] or the countermeasures.
Although the Paris Climate Agreement envisages a limitation of global warming to well below 2°C, preferably 1.5°C, and thus a massive reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, an despite initial successes [3], political efforts worldwide and in Germany [https://www.mcc-berlin.net/forschung.html accessed on 11.08.2020] can currently be described as absolutely insufficient.
The current extreme weather events such as bush fires, heavy rain, floods, heat waves and tornadoes reflect the fact that the current climatic changes follow those of a high-risk scenario [4].
The healthcare sector and its employees play a central role in combating the climate crisis:
- Healthcare is responsible for approximately 10% [5, 6] of global CO2 emissions.
- Health care workers have a prominent position in society and thus a key position in communicating the health significance of climate change.
- Action-oriented climate research, successful climate communication and climate-related teaching programs could lead to a comprehensive perception of the climate crisis as well as to a willingness to act among students, patients and other health care workers.
- Universities and colleges have a central responsibility in communicating a comprehensive concept of health in the sense of "planetary health and sustainability".
The special issue "Planetary Health and Climate Medicine" is intended to provide an overview of national and international initiatives on planetary health. We are looking for articles (original works, project reports, reviews, practical or field reports) on the topic of "Planetary Health and Climate Medicine", which e.g.
- present existing courses and curricula on the topic,
- identify development needs in this area (e.g. by means of a needs assessment),
- present aspects of competence transfer in the field of climate medicine and
- highlight didactic aspects of climate communication.
The following deadlines are binding in order to enable a timely realisation of the special issue:
- Submission of manuscripts until January 15 2022
- 1st round of review by external reviewers and the editors until April 15 2022
- Revisions by the authors until July 15 2022
- 2nd round of reviews by external reviewers and the editors until September 15 2022
- Final revisions by the authors until November 15 2022
- Final review and publication approval by editors and editorial board until December 15 2022
Manuscripts can either be submitted via MOPS (Manuscript Operating System) or sent as a Word file directly to the editorial office kontakt@gma-dach.org. For all article types, please also consider the author guidelines of GMS Journal for Medical Education for this theme issue and be sure to note in the submission that it is a contribution to the theme issue "Planetary Health and Climate Medicine".
All articles will undergo a regular review process with at least two external independent reviewers each and will be edited by the three editors of the theme issue. The final decision on publication generally rests with the journal's editorial board (Prof. Dr. Martin Fischer and Dr. Götz Fabry).
Contributions that reach us after the deadlines but have been revised and therefore may not appear in the thematic issue, may then be published in one of the following issues of the journal.
We look forward to your qualified contributions!
With best regards
Christoph Nikendei, Susanne Kühl, Till J. Bugaj
References
- Watts N, Amann M, Arnell N, Ayeb-Karlsson S, Belesova K, et al. The 2019 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: ensuring that the health of a child born today is not defined by a changing climate. Lancet. 2019;394(10211):1836-1878. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32596-6
- Hagedorn G, Kalmus P, Mann M, Vicca S, Van den Berge J, et al. Concerns of young protesters are justified Science. 2019;364(6436):139-140. DOI: 10.1126/science.aax3807C
- Figueres C, Le Quéré A, Mahindra O, Bäte G, Whiteman G, et al. Emissions Are Still Rising: Ramp Up the Cuts. Nature. 2018;564(7734):27-30. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-018-07585-6
- Schwalm CR, Glendon S, Duffy PB. RCP8.5 tracks cumulative CO2 emissions. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020;117(33):19656-19657. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2007117117
- Malik A, Lenzen M, McAlister S, McGain F. The carbon footprint of Australian health care. Lancet Planet Health. 2018;2(1):e27-e35. DOI: 10.1016/S2542-5196(17)30180-8
- Wu R. The carbon footprint of the Chinese health-care system: an environmentally extended input–output and structural path analysis study. Lancet Planet Health. 2019;3(10):e413-e419. DOI: 10.1016/S2542-5196(19)30192-5
