The settings approach to school-based health promotion (Macnab et al, 2014) involves addressing contextual factors, a necessary step for creating a supportive environment for student’s health and wellbeing. With that in mind, in many parts of the world, the greatest threats to student’s health and wellbeing nowadays are directly connected to global environmental changes (Simovska and McNamara, 2015). Heatwaves, drought, extraordinary storms and flooding are among some of the most serious challenges currently faced by many schools. The impacts on school include damages to physical structures, which decrease attendance and make it difficult for students and teachers to engage in basic hygiene habits, and an increase in temperature impeding concentration, exercise and proper leisure. As long as it remains ill-equipped to provide the supportive environment children and youth need, the school cannot pretend to be a safe space.

It is thus important to draw a parallel with the Covid-19 situation to see if any lesson was learned. During the pandemic, governments systematically labelled schools as risky environments. Children's health and well-being had to be given top priority while at the same time social interactions and learning had to be ensured. Curbing the effects of the pandemic was attempted without explicitly using a Health Promoting Schools (HPS) approach, and as in any other settings, thus without necessary taking in consideration the specificity of the educational context. As an example, schools in Latin America were closed for more than two years (UNICEF, 2021) as a strategy to protect students. In these locations, education has further continued to be disrupted a great part of 2022, contributing to increased inequity among children and youth who may have benefited from in-person schooling. In other locations, school closure was minimized, and students were repeatedly exposed to the coronavirus, leading to dramatic consequences among the most the marginalized populations.

As we all know, the HPS approach was showing important limitations even before the Covid-19 pandemic in its intention to tackle social inequities and improve the students’ quality of life. We are now more aware of some of the constraints faced by schools when trying to address the social determinants of health. Among possible actions a HPS can promote are: ensuring a structure that is supportive of students' well-being and thus pertinent for the specific context, implementing health education, and empowering school actors in engaging the community and social and political structures. Above all, health promotion must put a greater focus on the interdependency between health and the biophysical environment (Forget and Lebel, 2001; Labonté, 1993; Lebel, 2003; Srinivasan et al., 2003; St Leger, 2003).

As an aim of health promotion, achieving greater social equity in the context of global environmental change implies an improved use of resources from the biophysical environment, which requires addressing power hierarchies that have shaped how resources are managed and distributed. Taking in consideration such complexity, the HPS framework may not be pertinent or useful as it is. It could be time to reconsider the framework or think more in terms of policy reform and educational practice. This presentation delves into the challenges of global climate change for school-based health promotion, taking Latin America as a case study. In particular, it critiques the use of a framework that has its origin in high income countries, where it has first gained roots and further developed before spreading to middle-income countries presenting largely different socio-cultural and environmental realities.

Based on a review of peer-reviewed and grey literature, the study explores the framing of environmental change at the intersection of health and the school setting, including how health promotion is conceptualized in Latin America. We examine the potential limitations and strengths of the HPS approach in the targeted region and synthesize possible ways forward to confront global environmental change within the school setting, including through school-focused policy and school-based health education.

The presentation briefly explores lesson learned over the past years and provides some understanding of the challenges of global environmental change to education and schooling. We further address new perspectives on school-based health promotion within the context of global environmental change and propose a discussion on the relevance of the Health Promoting School approach for middle income countries of Latin America.

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