My name is Gillian Lê.
I used to work in health financing for low resourced Asia Pacific, particularly Southeast Asia. My background is Anthropology.
In 2023, I read a report about climate finance for global health. And I couldn’t pin down what it meant for health systems at the grassroots, in the places that I had worked in.
Financing is consistently identified by governments as the No.1 need for health systems. But the discussions on climate finance for health seemed defined by the culture and norms of international organizations and academic circles. I struggled to find any grassroot realism in those discussions.
This blog started out as my attempt to understand climate finance that increasingly includes biodiversity. What is it? How does it work?
The Anthropology bit is important because I don’t believe in ‘copy+paste’ development: copying projects or concepts that worked in one country or context and then pasting into a different setting. I believe that every country can get to zero pollution, awe inspiring biodiversity, and climate resilient health systems in their own particular way.
‘Living Health Systems’ was inspired by the Living Buildings Challenge at the International Living Futures Institute. The Living Building Challenges mandates beauty and biophilia by design, building without toxic materials, independence in water and energy, circular economy for materials, and embedding buildings within local cultural histories and ecologies for awe inspiring places to live and work in.
Since starting this blog, I have gone deeper into the finance maze and decided to move out of health development and into ethical financial planning. A move still in process at time of writing… and the changing blog topics reflects where I am with this move.
Previously I was based in Ho Chi Minh City, but these days in the UK.
