Importance of environmental health science

Hurricanes, climate change, and the importance of environmental health science

by Craig J. Newschaffer
Raymond E. and Erin Stuart Schultz Dean, College of Health and Human Development

Evidence is already accumulating that the intensity of last month’s sequential hurricanes was attributable to climate change. Researchers at Imperial College’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment released rapid impact studies showing that the climate-change-attributable additional economic cost of Helene and Milton attributable to climate change total in the billions of dollars. On top of economic impact, the human impact is, of course, profound.

While we can fairly quickly assess these hurricanes’ death toll, now approaching 250 individual lives lost, the longer-term health consequences cumulating from injury, infrastructure damage, disruption to health care access, aftermath effects of flooding on the environment, and mental health challenges, etc., will take much longer to understand and quantify…but they will be profound. Asheville, a city of nearly 100,000 individuals that that had gained a reputation as a climate refuge (a concept that climate scientists have long sought to dispute as fantasy), is still under a water boil advisory a month after the hurricane passed through western North Carolina.

I recommend that anyone interested in the general topic of extreme weather and human health read a prescient 2023 article in Scientific American authored by the leader of college’s Environmental Health Science program area, Associate Professor of Biobehavioral Health and Anthropology Asher Rosinger. In it, Dr. Rosinger provides striking examples of climate change-exacerbated extreme weather events that have already happened around the world and the long-term health effects that they are bringing.

In addition to considering health effects of extreme weather events, we also have to be cognizant of more insidious effects of climate change on our health and well-being. None is more insidious than the direct health effects of heat. The non-profit climate research institute, Climate Central, estimated in a recent study that between June and August this past year, more than 2 billion people worldwide experienced at least 30 days of climate change-attributable temperatures above established health risk thresholds. This study cites that more than one billion residents in 72 countries recorded their hottest June–August since 1970. The college is already active in this research domain through the work of Larry Kenney, Professor of Kinesiology and Physiology and Marie Underhill Noll Chair in Human Performance, who studies human thermoregulation and has recently reported that heat and humidity can begin to stress the human body at much lower levels than previously thought (view a recent news story on Dr. Kenney’s work here).

Finally, let us not forget about the impact of non-climate-change-related environmental influences on health and well-being. The WHO estimates that 2 million lives and 53-million disability adjusted life years are lost annually due to quantifiable exposure to environmental chemicals, admitting that these figures are gross underestimates due to data limitations and severely undershoot reality. Another example is the health protective role of greenspace in urban environments. A robust and growing base of scientific literature supports the benefits of urban greenspace on a wide range of human health, development, and well-being outcomes (for more here, see this annotated literature review from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health).

I could not be more convinced that building our capability in environmental health science comes at a critical moment for society. Further, it is known that vulnerability to every environmental threat highlighted above will be modified by both social determinants and position in the life course as well as impacting both physical and mental health. Consequently, the traditional areas of strength that this college has built will enable us to have further real and lasting impact in this field.