Linking Environmental Change to Public Health in Africa – Closing the Gap Between Evidence and Practice
Speaker: James Hassell, Research Scientist, Smithsonian Global Health Program
Global environmental change represents an unprecedented threat to public health. A substantial body of evidence now connects climate and other human-driven environmental changes (such as deforestation and shifts in land use and food systems) to infectious and non-communicable disease. Addressing and building human resilience to these threats are global goals, but there are no internationally agreed-upon standards for regular collection and interpretation of data that can be used to monitor and forecast the direct impacts of these changes on people’s health. Drawing on a review we recently conducted with WWF, I will speak about opportunities that exist to scale data collection efforts so that they meet the public health needs of different stakeholders within changing landscapes.