Webinar On-Demand: 2024 AAAS Plenary Panel on Global Warming and Health

On February 16, 2024, Pulitzer Center grantees Meredith Wadman and Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar participated in a panel on the effects of a warming planet on public health. The Center funded travel for this panel and for the special issue of Science on which it is based. 

About the Panel: 

Earth scientists often call climate change a “great global experiment,” which humanity is heedlessly performing as we pump out greenhouse gases. The consequences are already becoming clear—not just for the planet, but for our own health. 

A warmer climate favors the mosquito that spreads dengue and may already be fueling a worldwide surge in the debilitating disease. Warming may also have enabled malaria-carrying mosquitoes to flourish in Africa’s cooler highlands and ticks that carry Lyme disease to advance northward. Then there are the direct effects of heat on the human body. 

Thousands die every summer from worsening heat waves, and chronic kidney disease has killed thousands of outdoor laborers such as Central American sugarcane workers. Most were previously healthy young men. Pregnant people and their fetuses, like the innumerable women who toil outdoors in sub-Saharan Africa, are also highly vulnerable to heat for reasons that researchers are only beginning to probe. 

But even in countries where air conditioning and window screens are scarce, adaptation is possible.

In addition to Wadman and Chandrashekhar, panelists included:

Ana Bonell, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Jason Glaser, La Isla Network, Alpharetta, Georgia
Erin Mordecai, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Adelaide Lusambili, Africa International University, Nairobi, Kenya

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Image courtesy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2024 Annual Meeting Plenary Session. Denver.