Jonathan Patz, MD, MPH, is a Professor & Director of Global Environmental Health at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He Co-chaired the health expert panel of the US National Assessment on Climate Change and was a Convening Lead Author for the United Nations/World Bank Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. For the past 14 years, Dr. Patz has been a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) – the organization that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
He is President of the International Association for Ecology and Health and has written over 75 peer-reviewed papers and a textbook addressing the health effects of global environmental change. He has served on several scientific committees of the National Academy of Sciences, and currently serves on science advisory boards for both CDC and EPA. In addition to his sharing in this year’s Nobel Prize, Dr. Patz received an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellows Award in 2005, and shared the Zayed International Prize for the Environment in 2006.
He has earned medical board certification in both Occupational/Environmental Medicine and Family Medicine and received his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University (1987) and his Master of Public Health degree (1992) from Johns Hopkins University.
Abstract
TITLE:
Global Warming & Health: Great Risks AND Opportunities
ABSTRACT:
While melting polar regions, crop failures, and storm disasters dominate the public discourse on global warming, human health risks from climate change are of high concern in the public health field. This presentation will provide case studies showing exposure pathways through which climate change will likely alter health risks. In the US, what will be some of the regional health impacts of climate change? New analyses will be presented from an ongoing grant to begin to answer this question. However, climate change operates at the global scale and poses a unique and ‘involuntary exposure’ to many societies that are hardly responsible for causing the problem. Moreover, poor countries in tropical regions contain many climate-sensitive diseases. Global warming therefore may be one of the largest health inequities of our time. The U.S. per capita emissions exceed 5 metric tons of carbon per year – five times the global average. How should the average American respond to such information? Also, our energy intensive lifestyle is not the healthiest (consider for example that 60% of Americans do not meet the recommended level of daily exercise, and that obesity is now the top ranked health crisis in the US). Are there then not co-benefits to changing our energy intensive lifestyles? I will present a case study that shows how mitigating global warming could be a substantial opportunity to improve the health of the public.
Article
Impact of Regional Climate Change on Human Health
Patz, J. A., D. Campbell-Lendrum, T. Holloway, J.A. Foley (2005). Impact of regional climate change on human health. Nature, 438(7066), 310.
