2026 Reports

Climate Care Champions Program: Building Heat-Resilient Communities Through Frontline Health Worker Training

Sorensen, Cecilia; Magalhães, Danielly de P.; DePhillips, Michelle; Herrera Nimmagadda, Nymisha; Sullivan, James; Tikmani, Vedika; Hadley, Kristie; Weinstein, Hannah N. W.; Shree, Nithya; K, Umashankar; Syam, Syama B.; O'Donnell, Margaret; Chaudhuri, Angela

In the Fall of 2023, The Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE) at Columbia University and Swasti, a Non-governmental health organization based in Southeast Asia, established the Climate Care Champions Program (CCCP), a pilot program to increase the capacity of frontline health workers in India to identify, treat, and prevent heat-related illness. In its first year, CCCP designed a heat-health awareness curriculum and implemented a cascading train-the-trainer initiative across seven states and Delhi. Now in its second year, this program, to date, has trained approximately 200 health professional educators, including health workers from all of Ananthapuramu (in Andhra Pradesh) district's primary healthcare centers, who have then gone on to train more than 2500 frontline health workers. These frontline workers are now equipped to communicate the risks of extreme heat, make protective recommendations to at-risk individuals and families, identify the early warning signs of heat stress, and respond effectively to both patient and community needs. The CCCP represents an adaptable low cost, high impact urban climate initiative that addresses the urgent need to strengthen health professional capacity to respond to emergent and intensifying climate threats.

Keywords: heat; capacity-building; health