Climate Care Champions Program

Mobilizing Community Health Workers for Climate-Ready Communities

About the Program:

Climate change is the greatest health challenge of the 21st century. It threatens elements essential for human survival including air, food, water, shelter, and security. Climate change amplifies extreme events such as heat waves, floods, storms, wildfires, impacting air quality, food and water security, triggering migration and conflicts. It also directly affects our health by increasing incidence and prevalence of infectious diseases, respiratory diseases, and chronic diseases.

Urgent action is needed to address these ongoing and impending threats to the health and wellbeing of vulnerable communities including the urban and rural poor, women and children, elderly and migrant workers across Asia and the world. 

To meet these needs, Swasti and the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE), Columbia University, have partnered to develop evidence-based training for front-line community health workers.

The ClimateCare Champions Program addresses this critical gap in knowledge and preparedness among Swasti’s network of community health workers, enabling them to prevent, prepare for- and respond to climate-related health needs in the communities they serve. This program was initially run in two phases in India and is intended to be scaled and adapted to meet the needs of any specific geography or community globally. 

CCCP's train-the-trainer model is unique in its flexibility: it successfully pairs the strengths of top-down expert-led programs that employ research-based best practices with trusted local voices who provide critical on-the-ground tailoring and contextual knowledge. As a result, the program creates an interlaced network of regional experts, skilled trainers, frontline community health workers, local leaders and community members who simultaneously weave climate preparedness into existing relationships, new alliances and interscalar collaborations.  

The key goals are to:

1. Increase Community Health Workers’ knowledge and efficacy related to the climate crisis so they may screen, detect, refer and prevent adverse climatic effects on the health and wellbeing of the vulnerable communities they serve. 
2. Build and strengthen the communication and advocacy skills of the community health workforce through training in risk and strategic communication materials so that they can serve as trusted messengers within their communities and with decision makers in both the private and public sector to advocate for localized interventions to address climate risks on health. 
3. Equip Community Health Workers with the expertise and tools necessary to effectively engage with disaster management, health systems, and other local resources, fostering community resilience and adaptation in the face of extreme weather events.

To assist these vulnerable communities, we created tailor-made Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) materials specifically designed for Community Health Workers (CHWs). These materials are available in multiple languages and formats and are peer-reviewed by health professionals. 

Heat and Health Workshop Training of Trainers:

Phase 1: Pilot 

In February 2024, the CCCP hosted an in-person 1.5 day Training of Trainers (ToT) heat-health awareness workshop for 23 health-unit leads from seven Indian states—Karnataka, Haryana, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, as well as NCR—in Bangalore. Following the workshop, our master trainers delivered trainings to 323 FLWs across eight distinct geographies, through both in-person and virtual means. The map below illustrates the community, number of attendees, and reach of those trainees for each workshop. 

Phase 2 

Building on the success of the first training series, GCCHE established a partnership with the Ministry of Health of Andhra Pradesh to train all health units in the district of Ananthapuramu, where high temperatures, low tree cover, and limited socio-economic opportunities make its population particularly vulnerable to heat-related illness. In February 2025, 91 health professionals—including Community Health Officers, Auxiliary Nurse Midwives, and Medical Officers from health facilities across the Ananthapuramu district—participated in the Training of Trainers (ToT) workshop.  

Later that month, these 91 trainers trained 2,266 Frontline Health Workers (FLWs) across 51 Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs) in Ananthapuramu District. These 2266 FLWs represent the full network of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs), and Community Health Officers (CHOs) serving across all Primary Healthcare Centres in the Ananthapuramu District. Each FLW is responsible for a defined catchment area—typically covering 1,000 to 2,000 people—ensuring that their combined outreach spans the entire district population. In sum, the trained FLW service network covers 4.5 million individuals.  Below are images from the FLW trainings.

Proven Program Impact

Since February 2025, GCCHE and Swasti have held monthly follow-up meetings for both trainers and FLWs, creating communities of practice where they can discuss challenges, strategies, and success stories. In one such meeting, Harinath, a trained community health officer, presented this case study from the field that demonstrated how he applied the knowledge he learned from the training: 

On March 21, Harinath encountered Mr. R, a 28-year-old male who was experiencing vomiting and fatigue after returning home from work. Using his training from the CCCP, Harinath immediately took his vital signs and found his temperature to be 103°F, potentially compatible with heat stroke. His blood pressure had dropped to a critical 70/40 mmHg and pulse was 60 bpm.  Harinath immediately took life-saving steps: he moved the patient to a cool area, applied water via a wet sponge and placed him under a fan. 

 

When the patient's condition did not stabilize—his BP remaining low at 70/50—Harinath coordinated further medical support and transfer to a hospital setting where he was admitted for two days and received ongoing cooling and intravenous fluids.  Mr. R made a full recovery and survived without any persistent organ injury.  He was educated extensively on the early signs of heat illness and was prescribed ORS packets and multivitamins. 

Harinath organized a community education session to raise awareness about heat-related illnesses. He explained symptoms, causes, risk factors, emergency response steps, and guided the community on when and where to seek help. The response was overwhelmingly positive. People began carrying ORS-filled bottles to work, wearing cotton clothes, and shifting their working hours to cooler parts of the day (5AM–10AM), while resting during peak heat under trees or indoors.

As a result of these heat and health capacity-building trainings, participants are able to:

1. Identify and understand the fundamentals of heat-related illness, including how symptoms manifest in different populations (for example, elderly, children, pregnant women) and what to do if an individual has signs of heat-related illness
2. Identify and understand who is at risk of heat-related illness and why (personal, home, work, and community risk factors)
3. Communicate with families and communities about the health risks related to heat exposure
4. Educate families and communities about actions that can be taken to decrease the risk of heat illness, particularly in low-resource settings

The success of CCCP spurred the state of Andhra Pradesh to develop an Ananthapuramu District Heat Action Plan (HAP) and Heat Early Warning System. As part of their multi-sectoral approach to building heat resilience, the Ananthapuramu District’s new heat action plan includes  the CCCP’s training schedule and curriculum materials to train professionals ranging from specialists to community health workers. The State’s HAP emphasizes the critical role of a trained health workforce for the establishment and maintenance of a robust Heat-Related Illness (HRI) surveillance system, the first of its kind for the district. 

Key Learnings: