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Paramedics should be powerful climate messengers, instead they fret over plastic

By Alex Randall on January 24, 2022

Paramedics are in a powerful position as potential climate change communicators due to their real world experience of dealing with its health impacts. But instead, thinking about climate change leads many to worry about the environmental impacts of the profession, and to feel guilty and powerless. This needs to change.

Last year Climate Outreach spoke with a group of paramedics about the way they see climate change impacting their work. Our goal in these conversations was to speak with people who are on the front lines of dealing with some of the health impacts of climate change in the UK – air quality, extreme heat and flooding – and get their perspective. 

Have these experiences changed the way paramedics connect the dots between climate change, health and emergencies? Has witnessing the health consequences of climate change first hand changed the way they see themselves and their work?

The interviews with paramedics were part of the pilot phase of our Climate Engagement Lab,  working with the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change and the College of Paramedics. The Lab helps UK civil society groups understand and reach new audiences and explore ways to deepen their engagement, drawing lessons for the wider sector. Our partners wanted to understand more about how paramedics think about climate change, given they are on the front line of many of its impacts.

Urban centre covered in smog in winter. Gurugram, India.

Jumping-in points

In our conversations we saw some common ‘jumping-in points’: climate change issues that were at the front of our interviewees’ minds, and the first issues they mentioned in our conversation about climate change. For most of the interviewees, the issue of single-use plastics in medical professions came up first or early in the conversation. 

Another common topic was the carbon emissions resulting from ambulances. This combination of vehicle emissions and single-use plastics seems to have left many paramedics feeling that their profession has a high environmental impact. Many interviewees expressed a combination of guilt and frustration at this – a sense that there was a very visible and tangible climate impact to their work, and that reducing this impact was out of their control.

Issues around the connection between climate, extreme weather events and health were also brought up by the interviewed paramedics, but this happened later, as the conversations deepened. Some interviewees reflected on how their work changed during periods of extreme weather – especially when the combination of heat waves and poor air quality lead to more call-outs and hospitalisations. 

All the paramedics that we spoke with said they understood that these events were likely to get worse, and that negative health consequences would follow. Most also said they felt powerless to act, or felt their actions wouldn’t change anything. However these issues were mentioned later, and seemed less front-of-mind compared with issues around plastics and vehicle emissions. 

 

Impact of, or impact on

What struck me while conducting these interviews was that most paramedics focused on the environmental impact of the profession, rather than the consequences of climate change on their work. I couldn’t help feeling during the interviews that paramedics had been made to feel needlessly guilty about vehicle emissions and single-use plastics. 

Messages about reducing consumer plastic waste and vehicle emissions are important. Communicating with the wider public about their climate impact and the options they have for reducing it is vital. However, the impact this messaging had on the paramedics I spoke with was to make them feel worried yet powerless about the plastics and vehicle emissions that result from their daily work.

Workers sort out plastic bottles for recycling in a factory. Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Coming away from each interview I couldn’t help feeling that this was wrong. For paramedics, single-use plastics are vital for hygiene and safety reasons. The journeys made by ambulances are essential. Of course efforts can and should be made to reduce these. But individual paramedics shouldn’t have to feel simultaneously guilty and powerless over them. 

The paramedics I spoke to did also see themselves as a group of professionals who are already helping people cope with the health consequences of climate change. But this came second and was often obscured by what seemed like stronger or more immediate feelings about their own impact on the climate. 

Having conducted these interviews with paramedics I’m convinced of the role they could potentially play as climate communicators. Everyone I interviewed spoke powerfully about the health implications of climate change. They were able to speak about this not in a theoretical sense, and reflected on their tangible real world experience of dealing with these medical emergencies. 

 

Ways forward

Paramedics are in a powerful position to talk about the reality of the health impacts of climate change. As medical professionals they also occupy a unique position as highly trusted individuals. Health very often tops the list of people’s concerns and worries. With the right support, paramedics could have an important role to play in the climate debate as they are able to connect climate change with an issue of deep public concern, and to do so as highly trusted members of society. Even just talking about their experiences and what it means is an important part of making social change and motivating people to take action. On the topic of climate change, paramedics should not feel powerless. 

Our conversations with paramedics also point to wider issues in the public communication of climate change. Many of us initially look to our own environmental impact and end up feeling guilty or powerless to act. This raises wider questions about how important it is that messages about our impact are paired with messages that also show tangible actions people can take, which builds a sense of efficacy

The paramedics we interviewed had some very powerful stories about the impacts of climate change they had witnessed. People from all walks of life have these stories too. Encouraging people to explore and explain these stories is going to form a key part of broadening the conversation about climate change. Our conversations have started to help us explore what this might look like with paramedics, but there are powerful and compelling stories hidden in people’s daily lives right across society. 

 

Climate Outreach worked with the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change and the College of Paramedics to conduct five semi-structured interviews with paramedics in the UK during April and May 2021. This was as part of the pilot phase of the Climate Engagement Lab funded by the Samworth Foundation, Kestrelman Trust and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Climate Outreach would like to thank the Samworth Foundation for supporting the writing of this blog as a part of the Climate Engagement Lab.

3 responses to Paramedics should be powerful climate messengers, instead they fret over plastic

  1. MANDA BROOKMABN says: says:

    Our work with health professionals in Cornwall resonates entirely with this – the first tangible way in to the issue is seen as plastics and waste. I suspect this is because the wider climate crisis seems too large; because no-one is talking about banking or pensions or consumption, but everyone has had some exposure to the need to recycle and reduce waste. So it’s an obvious first port of call. But I think the bigger issue, other than people being made to feel needlessly guilty, is that we have had almost no national context for framing these impacts as direct consequences of a climatic change, so the first “action” people get to is mitigation; they are nowhere near a conversation about adaptation, and even further away from a sense of permission to advocate for change. The waste plastics is important as it is a factor in pollution, just like carbon; but it’s a way in for most people. So we would suggest:
    – start with the recycling and see what can be done locally to change local systems (action v guilt)
    – enable people to feel some sense of achievement in those changes (participation and agency v powerlessness
    – make the connection with the wider issue of extreme weather events to enable them to perceive themselves as active agents (as above), and then work on adaptation as a linked issue (making extreme weather plans for their health service)
    – then enable them to step up from the action (on plastic) and planning (on adaptation) and move towards active advocacy – using their experience on the front line to craft change with those around then, and above them in the very hierarchical health system

    This, we have found, pertains across all areas of health – not just paramedics. Very happy to chat or connect with anyone else working on this.

    Manda Brookman
    Programme Manager, Cornwall Primary Care Climate Resilience Programme
    mandab@volunteercornwall.org.uk

  2. Hugh Tyrrell says: says:

    We have been propagandised and individuated [new words…] to become a collection of objects rather than a community of subjects, as Thomas Berry puts it. The anxiety that the paramedics feel can and should, for example, be channelled into joint action with their leadership in persuading the industry associations they belong to, to make public stands using the very powerful scenario – as in the blog post above – that there is a temperature point at which there will be massive die-off of humans. And that they strongly advocate for and support government action now to reduce carbon emissions wherever they can.

  3. Geoff Allan says: says:

    We need to take our head out of the sand in terms of rising temperatures. Hyperthermia begings to be life-threatening when sustained body temperature reaches 40 degrees C, Looking at the familiar graph of steeply rising global temperatures since 1850, there will be a point in time when global mass deaths from hyperthermia will set in.
    I say that it’s incumbent on medics/ paramedics to publicize that information graphically and spell out the truth. They simply need to look at the graph and mark off roughly when it will be.
    It’s time for us as individuals and societies to face up to and spell out the specifics as to the inevitable mass exterminations of humans and other species if the path of steeply rising temperatures continues.
    Instead, most of us duck away from the stark reality, and imagine that somehow life will just go on much the same for our children. It won’t.

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By Alex Randall

Alex manages the Climate Change and Migration Coalition – an alliance that exists to challenge the lack of long-term strategies to support and protect people at risk of displacement linked to environmental change.

Before joining Climate Outreach, he worked at the Centre for Alternative Technology. He has also worked for the Public Interest Research Centre on their Values and Frames project. He co-founded Cheat Neutral, a spoof offsetting company, and UN Fair Play, an organisation that works with small island states at international climate change negotiations.

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