We study climate solutions across scales to improve both human and environmental health.
Our goal is to center the climate change discourse on health co-benefits of climate solutions. The more we discover the health benefits from a low-carbon economy, the quicker we may progress towards a healthier future.
Major Themes in Our Work
Health co-benefits of climate change mitigation policies
Health Benefits of Clean Energy
We assess the health and equity benefits from different climate mitigation policies (e.g., cleaner air from burning less fossil fuels) . Our goal is to quantify these benefits so decision makers can include such calculations in their decision making process.
Health Benefits of active travel & smart urban design
We're quantifying the health benefits from increased physical fitness that comes from switching modes of travel — shifting from commuting by car, to traveling by bike or on foot. Urban design is key to SAFELY achieve this large health benefit. Ultimately, our research should inspire the development of cities designed for people, not just for cars (as many in the U.S. currently are).
Nature-based Solutions & Sustainable Food Systems
We study how human driven land-use change affects ecosystems and can lead to disease outbreaks. Additionally, as agriculture contributes to a huge portion of this land-use change, we study more sustainable systems to feed our population.
Health Science & Climate Policy Interface
We are working with policy analysts to bring health and equity criteria into climate change policy making. We're broadening the outcomes that go into greenhouse gas mitigation policies, and in so doing, advancing the health rationale that can make new policies more likely to be established and adopted.
Featured Research
Respiratory Health and Social Benefits of 100% Clean Energy in the United States
In this study, we estimated the health benefits that could be realized if emissions of fine particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides from electricity generation, transportation, buildings, and industrial sources were eliminated in the United States.
We found that removing emissions from these sources could prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths each year nationwide and provide more than $600 billion in benefits from health costs.
Our results provided an indication of how substantial the benefits of ambitious clean energy and climate policy could be and the regions of the country where those benefits may occur.
Air Quality and Exercise-Related Health Benefits from Reduced Car Travel in the Midwestern United States
Using census tract-level mobile emissions estimates, we removed short automobile trips (<8 kilometers) across the 11 largest metropolitan areas in the midwestern U.S and simulated resultant changes in hourly pollutant concentrations. We then estimated annual human health outcomes, monetary outcomes, and increased physical fitness, under a scenario where half of those short car trips are replaced by bicycle trips.
We found that air pollution was reduced to the extent that 423 deaths would be avoided each year. Adding the benefits from active transport in place of driving saves another 700 lives annually.
Global Consequences of Land Use
Land use, to provide for the growing human population, affects forests, farmlands, waterways, infectious disease, and air quality. There has been a huge increase in crop production by increasing fertilizer and pesticide use, as well as an increase in the area of cropland.
The general findings of this review state that the acquisition of natural resources for immediate human needs often come at the expense of degrading environmental conditions. Land use for human needs (e.g., food production) needs to be balanced with the natural environment which in turn supports a healthier planet (e.g., higher biodiversity, improved water quality, more pollinators, diminished urban heat island effect).
* The review has been cited by 14,554 papers as of January 2024.
Supporting Research
Discover our Planetary Health Research Program
We support interdisciplinary research related to the intersection of environmental public health, climatic change, and ecological change - an emerging focus area termed “planetary health”. The goal is to connect a diverse community of scholars to share ideas, form collaborations, and generate new scholarship.
