We believe that faced by an uncertain
and potentially hazardous future,
as a result of climate change and other
dramatic environmental changes, the best contribution we can make
is to generate evidence, but not evidence in a vacuum, it’s
evidence for action.
The Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health
was set up in 2019 to coordinate the work
across the school on climate change and broader
planetary health issues, by which we mean the interaction
between environmental change and human health.
It does so by coordinating research,
the generation of new knowledge,
not just about the impact of these threats, but also
about the potential solutions, both adaptation and mitigation.
We look at the sort of two way relationships
between what we eat and our food systems,
so what goes into the production of our food
and our natural environment and also our health.
We work in three different countries,
in India, South Africa and also the UK.
One of the key things that we've discovered
is that there really needs to be a cross-government
response to these issues.
So to develop these healthy and sustainable food systems,
it can't be isolated policy making in health, in agriculture,
in the environment.
It needs to be coordinated across those departments to make sure
that the solutions work for people and for the environment as well.
So we perform these
relatively complex analysis linking these high resolution
mortality data for the whole England and Wales
disaggregated in more than 34,000
areas across the two countries
and we’ll link these data with the temperature.
And therefore, we are able to predict what will be
the impacts in the future
actually under different scenarios of climate change.
And we will be able to tell how many more deaths, for example,
there will be in each area
depending on these different scenarios
and I think this is important
also from a scientific point of view, of course,
but also from a communication perspective in order to let the
public and politicians know about different actions
that can be taken to prevent at least some of these impacts.
West Africa
is predicted to be one of the areas
that is most affected by extreme heat going forward.
So we've been looking at the exposure of extreme heat
for pregnant subsistence farmers and how that impacts on the mothers
and then also on the babies acutely while still in the womb.
I think before this work was done, maybe there wasn't
such an awareness around the dangers of heat
and particularly subsistence farmers that are often missing from
the literature.
And so we were quite shocked to find that in 33% of
field visits there was evidence of acute
fetal strain, so that the heat strain
from the mother was being passed on to the baby.
By highlighting the problem, we hope that this will then
put pregnant women on the agenda when it comes to adaptations
and identify them really as a risk group going forward.
So it''s this idea of understanding,
how can we work with a natural environment
and natural ecosystem to deliver multiple benefits?
So I'm predominantly just focused on the
what we call the AFALU sector,
so afforestation and land use sector,
and cities really come underneath
that because it's all about working with landscapes,
you know, in a beautiful park gives us like a really nice
natural ecosystem within a really, really huge city and the
various ways of understanding what are the health benefits.
Kind of the key one, the one that's been
explored a lot in the literature, mental health benefits
and I think we saw a lot of that from COVID when everyone was locked
down in their houses.
I think a walk in the park was very therapeutic.
But then they also other many, many, many benefits that have been
maybe not as well explored from a public health perspective
and this is around improvement in air qualities.
So if you
enact some of this nature based solution in cities,
the outcomes or the impact is huge because you're
talking about big populations.
So to conclude really, the climate crisis is a health emergency.
Traditionally, it's been conceived
of as an environmental emergency, but actually at the center of it,
at the heart of it is the threat it poses to human health.
And therefore, it's really important
that the health community steps up both the practitioner community,
the public health community, but also the research community.
It has such an important role
in developing the evidence base for action.