Would a “Green Legacy” initiative an answer for climate emergency and sustainable healthcare? A lesson from Ethiopia.

The essence of participatory development can be applied in health and environmental projects to ensure sustainable healthcare through tackling environmental crisis. Mostly, ‘few’ are key players in community projects from problem identification to implementation and evaluation, however, regardless of projects meant for their benefit the wider public treated as recipients of the outcome or have lesser or no ownership of issues affecting them. Community participation is a key for sustainability of any development projects.

 Globally, forests  have been depleting in alarming rate because of population growth, agricultural expansion, wildfires, timber, firewood, etc. In is obvious forests (plants) are ‘cleaners’ of the greenhouse gases (CO2) and give us the oxygen with no cost. The loss of forests exposed the land to excessive erosion, flooding and loss of fertile soil that led to low productivity and food insecurity that directly affected the health of millions of people in the world. The development of technology enabled the global north to manufacture fertilizers to increase productivity. However, chemical fertilizers are the ‘power houses’ of green gas emission that affected health.

An initiative by Ethiopian government called a “Green Legacy” that has been operating for the last two years aimed at planting 4 billion trees every year to tackle climate crisis (erosion, flooding, drought, heatwaves etc). It encouraged the wider public to take active role from inception to implementation of the project.  The initiative not limited to Ethiopia but reached neighboring countries such as Djibouti and Eritrea where Ethiopia distributed seedlings of different tree species for those countries with its own cost. Such large-scale initiatives may be one of the ways of tackling climate crisis and ensuring sustainable healthcare.