Some of the Centre’s senior academics have delivered a special session on nature-based solutions as part of a recent World Health Organisation event celebrating 40 years of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion.

Emerging from the 1st international conference on health promotion in 1986, the Ottawa Charter focused on enabling people to both increase control over and improve their health. It centred on enabling equity in health – reducing differences in people’s health status and “ensuring equal opportunities and resources to enable all people to achieve their fullest health potential.”

Yet, several decades on, much remains to be done to achieve health equity across the world, and the WHO event launched a renewed call to reboot health promotion.

With hundreds of international participants joining online, and with further contributions from state ministers, authorities, and health promotion experts, the rebooting event shone a light on how to catalyse health promotion. Topics included framing health as a critical part of the wellbeing economy – with significant returns on prevention investment – and tackling health issues that were only emerging 40 years ago, such as digital health and climate change.

In the Centre’s role as a WHO Collaborating Centre on Natural Environments and Health, Ben Wheeler, Becca Lovell, and Conny Guell (along with WHO colleagues) organised and delivered a special session on nature-based solutions for prevention and health promotion in a changing climate.

Alongside sharing the Centre’s research on nature-based solutions, other contributors to the session included representatives from the Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Lithuania, the City of Nice, and the European Environment Agency.

Ben was also invited to join a plenary panel at the event to share the importance of developing actions to benefit both the environment and public health, with around 800 international attendees.