Learning from Eco-social Approaches to Public Health
Invitation: Join us for a 'Learning from Eco-social Approaches to Public Health' (LEAPH) presentation: All Welcome! Please share widely
Presentation: Transforming Health-System Responses to Relational Disruption: Findings and Implications from the Nechako Watershed
By: Dr. Christiana O. Onabola
Date: Thurs Nov 26, 12-1pm BC/PDT Time
What can decades of evidence from the Nechako watershed tell us about how environmental change becomes consequential for health?
This presentation brings together findings from documentary and situational analysis with spatial and temporal analyses of population health and marginalization across the watershed. The findings show that the effects of large-scale resource development and environmental change do not stop at the riverbank. Changes involving water, salmon, land, and governance can disrupt relationships through which people experience place, cultural continuity, livelihoods, community, and agency in everyday life. These disruptions can, in turn, become consequential for mental health, wellbeing, and health equity.
Spatial analyses adds another dimension, revealing uneven patterns of socioeconomic and health outcomes across the watershed while also highlighting what conventional population-level data cannot readily capture about relational experiences of environmental change.
Bringing these forms of evidence together, the presentation introduces disrupted proximal processes as a way of understanding how governance and ecological change can become embodied through everyday relationships and conditions. It concludes by considering what these findings mean for health systems and how responses might better connect healthy people, healthy communities, and healthy ecosystems.