January 25, 2021
A team of Nelson Institute alumni and researchers are at the forefront of efforts aimed at making climate change personal through a focus on public health. These new studies, which include two papers published in Health Affairs, aim to jumpstart educational efforts around this topic while also encouraging a greater understanding of the economic costs of climate-related health problems.
The first study, “Developing a Definition of Climate and Health Literacy” was led by Nelson Institute and Population Health Sciences alumnus and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) climate and health scientist, Vijay S. Limaye, Nelson Institute alumna and University of Wisconsin-Madison post-doctoral researcher Valerie Stull, Nelson Institute affiliate and director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Jonathan Patz, as well as alumna and Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Wisconsin–Madison researcher, Maggie Grabow.
The study draws attention to the lack of teaching of climate change as a health problem in K-12 settings and suggests a new literacy framework that can better support students and educators as they explore the health ramifications of a changing climate.
“My job at NRDC is focused on doing translational work to make climate and health science relevant to everyday people in terms of shaping effective solutions,” Vijay Limaye said of his role on this paper. “In thinking about this work, I was fortunate to collaborate with my previous advisor Jonathan Patz as well as two other colleagues at UW-Madison. Each of us has been energized and inspired by the youth climate movement, especially over the past two years. That new wave of enthusiasm and demand for action has been largely spearheaded by teenagers. It has pushed us to point out that those students across the country and around the world are not being taught sufficiently about the intersection of climate and heath.”
As a part of their study, the team analyzed peer-reviewed research on climate education and considered how the studies engaged with public health topics. Limaye said the team quickly noticed that many of the studies did not even acknowledge the human dimensions of climate change, whether it was our role in contributing to greenhouse gas pollution or the ramifications of big changes in the Earth’s climate system on human well-being. The team also found that the role of climate change in worsening existing health disparities received limited attention in teaching materials and that the United States is behind other countries in training students on climate and health.
“We found a glut of international climate and health information, but much less focused on U.S. audiences and younger students. 2020’s record setting year of climate disasters across the country should be a wakeup call that we need to equip our younger learners with climate change information since science tells us these students are going to have to cope with these huge health dangers for years to come,” Limaye said. “I’ve been studying the health risks of climate change for about a decade and, according to public opinion polling, the problem is becoming more undeniable to folks across the country. Yet, we still lack an adequate educational framework and teaching agenda to make the connection more concrete and actionable for our youngest learners. In this work, we thought about what could be done to improve understanding in key climate-health literacy elements for students. We adapted an existing framework endorsed by the federal government that recommends how best to teach about climate change generally and reframed those elements to focus on the human health ramifications of this crisis.”
Limaye explained that to date, the federal government has published guidance on improving student literacy in climate topics. But from a human health perspective, only a small fraction of that teaching content focuses on human health. So, Limaye and the team developed a corresponding set of principles to help focus the development of future curriculum on a human scale.
“We came up with a blueprint for future expansion of teaching on climate change and health that we think can substantially move the ball forward in shaping classroom learning that resonates with students,” Limaye said.
Their climate and health literacy framework includes three tiers or levels, which Limaye calls a stepladder approach to supporting learning on a massive topic. The team hopes this approach will make the complicated linkages between climate change and health a bit simpler for teachers to relay and for students to grasp. The first level is functional, where students learn to identify the root cause of humans in causing climate change and how climate affects global temperatures, sea level, and the water cycle. Next is the intermediate level, where students focus on improving understanding of how the environment affects both physical and mental health and how climate change is expected to worsen existing health disparities. Students also learn about solutions to slow climate change through mitigation (reducing emissions) and adaptation (community preparedness). The last level supports advanced understanding on the topic, including an ability to think critically about the data and models that link climate and health.
“We think that improved teaching about climate change and health can help to equip students with tools and knowledge that they can apply in their own lives,” Limaye said. “It will also help more students prepare for professional careers that will help society to respond to the problem. It’s not just doctors and nurses and health professionals who will have to grapple with this wide-reaching crisis.”
In fact, Limaye has spent much of his own career grappling with this impacts through his work as an air pollution policy expert at the Environmental Protection Agency and now as a climate and health scientist at NRDC. While his wide range of professional experiences has prepared Limaye for his current research, he says his time as a graduate student at the Nelson Institute set him up for a successful career.
“I work at the intersection of environmental health, science, and policy and the interdisciplinary training I was able to pursue through the Nelson Institute has set me up for a really robust and fulfilling professional experience,” Limaye said. “I’ve explored many angles of the climate and health problem and I feel like the skills that I gained at the Nelson Institute and the ability to combine that training with curriculum in epidemiology and walk that interdisciplinary walk at UW-Madison has really set me up for success professionally.”
That interdisciplinary education helped Limaye as he worked on another recent research paper which focuses on the economic impacts of climate change on health. Also published in Health Affairs, this study, which was led by Limaye and several colleagues at NRDC and the University of California-San Francisco, investigated the economic impact of climate change-related health problems and how these costs are calculated and can inform future climate response policies.
“When we think about the climate problem, we hear a lot about the cost of transitioning our economy to a clean energy system, but we hear a lot less about the mounting cost of delay and inaction on the problem. We tend to hear about climate damages that are related to what is insured or easy to count, for example property damage. Policymakers hear a lot less about the growing toll on human health—in some cases, irreversible damage--inflicted by the climate crisis,” Limaye said. “This paper explains the need to better estimate the costs to human health caused by climate problems. We know that climate change is linked to a number of health threats including searing extreme heat, severe wildfires, spikes in summer ozone air pollution, stronger coastal storms, worsening allergenic pollen seasons, and a worsening of certain infectious disease outbreaks. Each of these problems has a cost in terms of hospitalizations, doctor visits, and even early deaths. Action on climate change reduces those health costs, without a doubt.”
Limaye shared that he and NRDC colleagues published a study last year in GeoHealththat found that there were about 10 billion dollars in health related costs from a small sample of climate-sensitive events across the U.S. in just one year—including a devastating heat wave across Wisconsin that killed 27 people and sent more than 1,600 individuals to the emergency room for heat exhaustion. Those state-level findings were highlighted in the recent Wisconsin Governor's Task Force on Climate Change Report.
“If we just zoom out from that dollar figure, it’s clear that we are talking about billions of dollars each year that Americans are spending on climate-related health problems,” Limaye continued. “As a society, we must better account for these costs and acknowledge that Americans are paying dearly, in damaged lives and expensive hospital bills--to deal with this crisis. Right now, we are largely ignoring those enormous costs to individuals and families. We need to understand that our continued inaction on the climate threat does not come without a huge and growing price tag.”