Project Description Narrative:
Climate drivers affect health directly through weather events such as extreme heat or cold, wildfires, droughts, storm surges, and floods, and indirectly through air and water quality, food quality and access, infectious diseases, and massive population displacement events. These pathways are themselves influenced by environmental contexts related to land use, geography, infrastructure, and agriculture, as well as social, cultural, behavioral, and economic choices that create vulnerabilities and social risks associated with life stage, sex and gender, poverty, housing quality, discrimination, access to care, and other social determinants of health. According to the World Health Organization, the most vulnerable and marginalized populations are disproportionately affected by a changing climate, exacerbating existing health inequities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that climate change yields a diversity of adverse health impacts, e.g., air pollution and increased allergens worsen asthma, extreme heat worsens heart failure, flooding leads to drowning and catalyzes mold and respiratory distress, severe weather can cause injuries, new infectious diseases are emerging, and climate concerns cause anxiety and depression.
In Wisconsin, the risk of severe storms, extreme heat, exposure to wildfire smoke, flooding, and the spread of infectious disease vectors is increasing. Only 10% of preventable mortality in the U.S. is impacted by direct medical care, compared to 20% by environmental and societal factors. Despite climate and environment effects on health, almost no climate financing targets the health sector, with less than 5% of total global adaptation spending and less than 1% of multilateral climate adaptation finance targeting health. The recent United Nations Climate Change Conference included the first-ever day dedicated to health in the history of the climate negotiations. In addition, the healthcare sector is a major contributor to pollution that impacts the climate, with the U.S. health sector representing 8-10% of domestic greenhouse gas emissions. The newly established MCW Center for Sustainability, Health, and the Environment (the SHE Center) is concerned with the impacts of a changing climate and subsequent environmental transformations on the health of Wisconsinites, the role MCW and its health system affiliates play in contributing to local pollution, and access to care and education to enhance patient and community resiliency and adaptability.
The long-term aims of the SHE Center are sustaining a healthy and equitable environment; reducing greenhouse gas emissions and waste; and resiliently adapting to and creating solutions for environmental challenges by contributing scientific knowledge, transforming patient care, and increasing the environmental health literacy of faculty, trainees, staff, and community.
This project will launch development of the Center as a centralized unit to unify MCW efforts to address climate change as a top threat to public health through the lenses of MCW missions of education, patient care, research, and community engagement. The work in this project will focus on three aims: seek stakeholder engagement in shaping the center’s future agenda; broaden MCW’s research efforts related to environmental impacts on health; and formalize and solidify the MCW commitment to educating learners, the MCW community, and its partners on the impacts of climate on health as well as the impacts of healthcare delivery on the climate.