With more and more health professionals waking up to the threats of environmental destruction to individual and public health, civil society groups working on climate and health face the challenge of organizing the growing number of activists and channelling their actions towards where they reach the highest impact protecting health amid the climate crisis.

The German Alliance on Climate Change & Health (KLUG) is an organizational structure which enables each member to become a change agent in their own field of action and builds on synergies for a successful advocacy within and beyond the health community.

KLUG is a network of individuals and organizations from the German-speaking health sector, which was only created in 2017 but already shows a significant impact in Germany and the European region today. With its particular structure, transformational concept and broad engagement in key action fields, KLUG Informs the creation of climate and health organizations in other countries and cooperates with civil society organizations across the region. or even regional cooperation in the civil society sector.

There are five key organizational developments which are crucial to the vision of the organization:

1. Health for Future – a platform for activism

Initiated by KLUG in 2019, Health for Future is a decentralized activism structure of the Alliance. It is a rapidly growing network of more than 50 local groups, collaborating with the For Future movement, participating in climate strikes and engaging in local politics. The network ensures a broad reach out of the climate and health narrative, while maintaining a grassroots movement character and adapting to local realities. Health for Future holds a vast social media presence, runs capacity-building trainings for activists and provides an exchange platform for different regions. It is a crucial source where powerful messages around the climate and health emergency are created for the German context, facilitating local involvement and transformation.

2. Close to the science – academic partnerships

Scientific evidence forms the foundation for the organization’s activism. Early on, KLUG established partnerships with leading scientific and academic institutions in Germany and beyond. The scientific base increases the credibility of KLUG’s work and paves the way into professional associations and academic conferences. As the German partner organization for the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, the Alliance, together with leading German research institutions, translates international research to the German context and develops policy and action recommendations. Similar to all of the KLUGs work, the engagement with research seeks to bring transformational dimensions to the field – not only by learning from the researchers, but also by inspiring systematic changes of the research itself.

3. Sharing knowledge, experience and good practice – the Planetary Health Academy

Education and knowledge circulation are central to the success of the alliance. KLUG seeks to provide access to language and context adapted information for health care professionals, include planetary health into medical curricula and works closely with academic institutions like the University LMU Munich for the Advanced Course on Climate and Health Leadership. One outstanding educational project is the Planetary Health Academy – a series of online lectures and workshops which was initiated at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to keep learning experiences ongoing despite lockdown measures. It attracted more than a thousand international participants for each lecture and ran its third edition in summer 2021. The main idea behind the educational offers is not only to provide more information on planetary health, but furthermore turn knowledge into transformative action. With the Planetary Health Academy becoming international, KLUG also started more direct exchange with initiatives around the world, most prominently the Planetary Health Eastern Africa Hub. Supporting the Hub will contribute to establishing an international learning experience, inspiring initiatives on both sides and connecting the dots between local and global engagement.

4. Change from within – transforming the health sector

KLUG actively works with the health sector to inform and increase ambition towards carbon neutral health care. It supports the divestment from fossil fuels and calls for transparency and accountability of the German physicians’ pension funds. Additionally, KLUG fosters the ambition of hospitals, doctor’s offices and public health services to become climate neutral, and acts as an advisor and partner for these institutions. To date, more than 200 institutions are part of the call and commitment for achieving climate neutrality of the health sector by 2035. The work within the health sector is organized by working groups, supported by national coordinators but often implemented locally with the help of the Health for Future network.

5. Agenda Setting – from the health sector into policy and society

Based on its transformational approach, KLUG seeks to not only create a sustainable health care sector, but to influence politics on a bigger scale. Through ongoing engagement with professional associations, health insurance companies and politicians the alliance pushes climate change and health onto the agenda. Efforts include policy briefs based on the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, co-hosting of general meetings and conferences with well-established professional organizations and direct communication with policy makers. For the federal elections in September 2021, KLUG represents the voice of health professionals advocating for responsible climate politics, working directly with Health for Future groups to reach both the state and the national level. The alliance often acts as the bridge between science, politics and society, building links between various interest groups.

Since its foundation in 2017, KLUG has grown from a small group of committed health care professionals to a network of change agents, leading transformative action in the health care sector and beyond. On its paths, KLUG learned valuable lessons which inform its organizational structure today and might be relevant for other movements in the field. The combination of coordinated but self-organized projects and local grassroots movements within one alliance is key to the growing success of KLUG over the past years. It allows the organization to be a reliable partner for political and professional organizations, while maintaining a movement character which is on site, dynamic and reacts swiftly to windows of opportunity. Different arms of the alliance can learn from each other and use synergies, while keeping their uniqueness. All of this happens at close interlinkage with science, giving the activist and advocacy work a sound foundation.

With this structure enabling fast growth, KLUG can be seen as an example for climate and health movements within the European region and beyond.