Knowledge about sustainable health is important for the future

Understanding complex contexts

"I hope to use the knowledge I have acquired through this programme in a future job to educate and inform other people about health and sustainability. This will enable more people to think and make sustainable choices in the future. Hopefully, this will have a ripple effect," says Cathrine Brandt. She has chosen to take an honours certificate in sustainable health alongside her master's degree in education.

Brandt expects to gain a holistic understanding of one-health and systems thinking. This is about how the planet, people and animals are interconnected and affect each other. She is interested in how to think about sustainability from different perspectives.

"I applied first and foremost to increase my expertise in the concept of sustainability. At the same time, I wanted to collaborate interdisciplinary with other students," she says.

The Honours Certificate in Sustainable Health is an interdisciplinary course for everyone at master's level at the University of Oslo. The certificate is suitable for those who want to gain knowledge about some of the greatest health challenges of our time and how we can tackle them. Key questions include which health outcomes are linked to climate change and disturbed ecosystems, as well as which methods we can use to analyse issues related to sustainable health. The programme offers 20 ECTS.

Interdisciplinary study programme

Students on the Honours Certificate in Sustainable Health come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds; public health and epidemiology, interdisciplinary health sciences, nursing, education, clinical nutrition and international community health. This results in a high degree of interdisciplinary learning and, not least, exchange of experiences.

"Nature, climate, biodiversity and several other factors are interconnected and affect each other more than I previously thought."

Terese Signal is also a student, along with Cathrine Brandt. She is taking a master's degree in clinical nutrition. Her wish is to become better at implementing sustainability in as many parts of her life as possible. She would also like to get to know other students with the same interest.

"Being able to take a certificate alongside a degree opens up the possibility for people like me to explore other subjects that are interesting alongside the main study programme without having to take a degree in it."

Critical systems thinking

The lectures are in the afternoon. The person responsible for the lectures, Tony Sandset, is a researcher at the Centre for Sustainable Health Education/Unit for Sustainable Health. In one of the lectures, he focuses on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

"The SDGs can come into conflict with each other. Initially, they are intended to work synergistically, but this is not necessarily the case. And it's important to remember that the 17 goals work differently in different countries. "

Sandset believes that many people's understanding of sustainability is too narrow and that there is a tendency to focus only on carbon footprint and finance. "We need a broader understanding of sustainability," he says. "Health, climate and economy must be seen together."

"The pilot has been very good so far; the students have given very good feedback on the teaching and learning. The certificate provides an opportunity to really dive into themes that are about health and sustainability understood broadly; from climate and health to overtreatment and sustainable health systems, and from antibiotic resistance as a sustainability issue to how to work on developing greener cities and healthcare. In this sense, the certificate is important both to promote interdisciplinary learning and to offer Norway's only honours certificate in sustainable health topics," explains Sandset.