YSPH EMD Seminar: "Hotter, Sicker, Everywhere, All at Once: Reconceptualizing Infectious Disease Epidemiology for a 1.2° Warmer World"

Climate change is widely understood to be an unprecedented threat to public health — but quantitative estimates of the global burden of climate change haven't been updated for two decades. In my talk, I'll present a hypothesis about why health risks of climate change are so often underestimated, and discuss how tools from climate science, ecology, and econometrics can help close the methodological gaps that are holding climate epidemiology back. I'll highlight how those tools help us answer questions like: Have rising temperatures actually sparked a malaria resurgence in the east African highlands? How will bat immune systems handle extreme weather? And does climate change actually compare to other drivers of zoonotic spillover, like deforestation or poverty? I'll close by discussing opportunities for policy action to protect human health, including mechanisms and frameworks from global health law that could be repurposed for climate change adaptation.