The Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE) and The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) formalize a three-year agreement to link expert-led climate and health education with frontline peer learning.
New York and Geneva, 22 April 2026 (Earth Day) –
- In Al-Hudaidah, Yemen, a health professional traces a chain from prolonged drought to soil failure, crop loss, child malnutrition, and immune collapse.
- In Lahore, Pakistan, a physician describes smog so dense that closing doors and windows cannot keep it out of hospitals.
- In southeastern Ghana, eight communities cut off by flooding pool household funds to purchase a canoe so health workers can continue delivering care.
These are examples of experiences shared by health professionals enrolled in a peer learning course run by The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), documented through a measurement framework that captures how learning translates into changed professional practice.
They are precisely the kind of evidence that global climate and health commitments need but struggle to generate.
The Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE), based at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and TGLF have signed a three-year partnership agreement to create continuous pathways between GCCHE’s expert-led scientific education and TGLF’s global peer learning-to-action network.
Why this partnership, and why now
The 2025 Lancet Countdown reports that 12 of 20 monitored health indicators linked to climate change have reached record levels. The Belém Health Action Plan, launched at COP30, is the first international climate adaptation framework dedicated to health, backed by over 30 countries and USD 300 million in pledged funding. The WHO Global Action Plan on Climate Change and Health 2025 to 2028 calls for health workforce mobilization as a strategic priority.
These frameworks define what needs to happen. The question that remains largely unanswered is how: how global commitments reach the district hospitals, community clinics, and mobile health teams where climate impacts are felt first and most severely.
This partnership offers a tested approach.
What GCCHE brings
GCCHE is the world’s largest academic network dedicated to climate and health education.
Its membership spans more than 430 health professional schools and organizational partners across 70 countries, supported by 150 governmental and non-governmental partners and over 5,000 individual members. In 2025 alone, GCCHE trained 36,000 health professionals through its courses. It currently runs courses across every WHO region, from a 16-session clinical training programme developed with the European Network on Climate and Health Education (ENCHE), the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER), and Health Care Without Harm, to a regionally tailored Eastern Mediterranean Responders Course with over 1,500 registrants, developed in partnership with WHO EMRO and academic institutions from Oman, the UAE, Iran, and Pakistan.
Each course draws on leading researchers and practitioners from Columbia University and partner institutions worldwide.
GCCHE’s research portfolio includes the first international core competency framework for climate and health education, published with ASPHER, and peer-reviewed studies in The Lancet, BMJ, JAMA Network Open, and Frontiers in Public Health. An impact survey of course alumni found that more than 40 percent remained actively engaged in climate and health work one year after completing a course.
GCCHE also provides strategic and technical consultation to national governments and multilateral organizations, including Health Canada, the UK National Health Service, the Pan American Health Organization, and the Inter-American Development Bank, building institutional capacity for climate-resilient health systems at a policy level.
What TGLF brings
TGLF connects over 80,000 health and humanitarian practitioners across 137 countries through structured peer learning programmes that turn professional experience into documented action. Its most recent edition of Teach to Reach, a global peer learning platform, engaged 24,610 participants in a single edition, with 80 percent working at subnational level, more than half employed by government, and two-thirds serving remote, rural, or urban-poor populations.
TGLF’s climate and health programme includes a growing curriculum: the flagship course “Learning together to lead change on the frontline of climate change and health” and the new “One Health: Connecting people, animals, and the environment” primer, both part of a Certificate peer learning programme for leadership in climate change and health. Its REACH leaders network brings together organizational leaders from government and civil society for implementation-focused peer learning.
In 2025, TGLF partnered with Grand Challenges Canada, Science for Africa Foundation, and the Global Grand Challenges Network on the Global Climate Change and Health Survey, which gathered responses from 6,436 health and humanitarian workers. TGLF’s practitioner network contributed 3,900 of those responses (61%), providing the largest share of frontline, community-level perspectives in the survey.
TGLF has also developed a measurement framework calibrated against a global baseline of 10,095 health workers. This framework measures five dimensions of learning outcomes, from professional confidence through applied practice to perspective transformation, providing a reliable way to assess how learning initiatives produce measurable changes in professional capability.
What the partnership produces
The agreement establishes three objectives.
- From course to community. GCCHE learners gain access to TGLF’s peer learning network where they can find support to apply what they have learned. TGLF practitioners who identify technical knowledge needs are directed to GCCHE’s courses and resources. Both organizations cross-promote opportunities to maximize visibility and reach.
- From community to curriculum. TGLF’s insights reports, which synthesize structured observations from hundreds of health workers into documented patterns, are shared with GCCHE. GCCHE will review these insights to inform, validate, and adapt its curricula, ensuring that teaching remains responsive to the evolving reality of climate impacts in vulnerable settings.
- From learning to action. For select cohorts, the partners will co-deploy TGLF’s Impact Accelerator, a facilitated peer implementation methodology in which health professionals set weekly goals, report progress, and demonstrate results to their peers. This moves the measurement question from “Did participants gain knowledge?” to “What did they do with it, and what changed?”
What health workers are telling us
The most distinctive contribution of this partnership is the structured evidence it generates from the people closest to climate impacts on health.
TGLF’s most recent course cohort documents what happens when health workers receive structured support to analyze and respond to climate threats.
On severity. A health professional in Yemen described conditions in Al-Hudaidah with analytical precision: “We observed a significant increase in the severity and frequency of diarrhea, pneumonia and measles. A malnourished child could not fend off a simple infection, and a minor infection could push a moderately undernourished child into severe, life-threatening malnutrition. It created a devastating cycle. If we only treat the diarrhea or measles without understanding the root cause, we are failing our patients.”
A physician in Pakistan reported on Lahore’s winter smog: “Children and elderly are bearing the climate change’s brunt mostly. Even closing the doors and windows at home and offices could not stop smog entering the buildings. Pregnant women, children and elderly were badly struck by this effect of climate change.”
On response. In Ghana, a pharmacist described how eight flood-isolated communities collectively purchased a canoe to maintain health service access, then leveraged that initiative to secure district government commitments to build four static clinics, staff them through the Ministry of Health, and lobby the Roads Ministry for road rehabilitation in the 2026 budget. He independently connected the communities to an international NGO for clinic construction and a foundation for equipment.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a nurse described a women-led community malaria initiative: weekly clean-ups organized by village women who mobilized youth and men to clear mosquito breeding sites, resulting in a measurable reduction in malaria cases at the health post. “What inspired me most was that this action did not come from an official order. The community itself, led by these women, took the initiative.”
On what peer learning makes possible. A programme manager in Nigeria described a shift in professional identity: “Learning to map how floods disrupt transport, cold chain, staffing, and caregiver access shifted my identity from program implementer to systems steward. Before this module, I often chalked rainy-season service failures up to leadership, government, politics, or lack of will. After it, I see how climate shocks expose design and process gaps that I can anticipate and close.” He went on to develop a one-page Rain-Day Service Continuity Protocol specifying early clinic hours on forecast rain days, caregiver alerts with a backup site, and prepositioning of vaccines.
A health professional in Azerbaijan described acquiring a new analytical capability: “I now can structure my observations into a chain reaction that starts with a climate event, passes through environmental and social impacts, and ends with specific health problems. This has increased my confidence in discussing these issues with both communities and colleagues.”
A health worker in Nigeria captured the cross-border solidarity that peer learning produces: “Reading the stories and reviews from other health workers created a powerful sense of solidarity. It showed me that these are not isolated problems in my community but part of a global pattern affecting the most vulnerable. This has motivated me to proactively seek connections with agricultural officers and local NGOs, seeing them as essential partners in health.”
A physician in South Korea who began the course in a state of “climate fatigue” described reaching a new perspective by its conclusion: “I feel that I have come to understand the world more from a long-term, continuous flow perspective.”
The wider ecosystem
GCCHE’s membership encompasses more than 430 health professional schools and organizational partners, over 500 NGOs and civil society organizations, and 150 governmental and non-governmental partners across 60 countries. Regional networks in Europe (ENCHE, supported by the Sustainable Markets Initiative Health Systems Task Force), the Western Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean create a distributed infrastructure for expert-led education across every WHO region. Strategic partnerships with Health Canada, the UK National Health Service, the Pan American Health Organization, WHO EMRO, UNICEF, and the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments extend this reach into policy and health system governance.
TGLF’s ecosystem is anchored by the REACH health leaders network, which brings together leaders from over 4,000 locally-led organizations spanning government health services and civil society. These organizational leaders participate in Teach to Reach, TGLF’s global peer learning platform, which convenes thousands of health professionals around a shared challenge over a six-month cycle of preparatory inquiry, large-scale live assemblies, and structured follow-up. A single recent edition engaged 24,610 participants, 80 percent working at subnational level, more than half for government, two-thirds in remote, rural, or urban-poor settings. Teach to Reach’s significance is not only its scale but its function: it surfaces and structures the experiential knowledge of health workers closest to the populations most affected by climate change, generating practitioner evidence that both GCCHE’s curricula and funders’ investment decisions need.
Together, these networks form the infrastructure through which the partnership’s activities can reach the organizational leaders and frontline practitioners who will determine whether global climate and health commitments translate into local action.
About the partners
The Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE), based at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, is the world’s largest academic network dedicated to climate and health education. Founded in 2017 from a pledge at COP-21 in Paris co-led by Columbia University and the U.S. White House and endorsed by the World Health Organization, GCCHE unites more than 430 health professional schools and organizational members, 5,000 individual members, and 150 governmental and non-governmental partners across 70 countries. Its courses, all free and open to the public, trained 36,000 health professionals in 2025. GCCHE’s research has been published in The Lancet, JAMA Network Open, BMJ, and Frontiers in Public Health. It is led by Cecilia Sorensen, MD, associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Emergency Medicine at Columbia University.
The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) is a Swiss non-profit that researches, develops, and implements peer learning-to-action programmes for health and humanitarian practitioners. Founded in 2016, TGLF’s network spans over 80,000 health workers across 137 countries. Its climate and health programme, launched in 2023, includes a peer learning certificate programme, the Teach to Reach global learning platform, the REACH health leaders network, and insights reports that synthesize frontline practitioner observations into structured evidence. TGLF has developed an innovative measurement framework for assessing the impact of learning on professional practice, calibrated against a global baseline of over 10,000 health workers.
Media contacts
- For GCCHE: Dr Cecilia Sorensen, GCCHE Director, cjs2282@cumc.columbia.edu
- For TGLF: Dr María Fernanda Monzón, Global Partnerships Coordinator, communication@learning.foundation