Climate Change, Planetary Health, and Medicine

What you'll learn

• Explain the ways by which climate change impacts human health through environmental exposure pathways including natural disasters/extreme weather, changes in water quality and quantity, food insecurity, heat stress, air pollution and vector borne infections.

• Describe the impact of climate change, air pollution, and ecological degradation on health outcomes including cardiovascular, respiratory, reproductive, neurologic, immunologic, psychiatric, oncologic and infectious disease processes. 

• Identify risks for disease emergence, especially zoonoses, that arise from ecological degradation in the form of deforestation, land use changes, pollution and biodiversity loss.

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  Demonstrate capacity to take a clinical history of environmental exposure risks related to occupation, residence, local environmental hazards and indoor pollutants.

• Develop clinical prevention and treatment plans for extreme heat and air pollution exposure based upon identification of at-risk patients, including patients with underlying morbidities and inequitable social determinants of health.

• Anticipate and establish plans to address excess burdens of psychiatric disease that arise from climate-change-influenced extreme weather events such as heat waves, wildfires, more severe hurricanes and flooding.