Published April 21, 2008, last updated on March 4, 2013
“When I was an undergraduate at Duke 15 years ago, I don’t recall a single class in which climate change came up.”
That is what Jason West, an atmospheric chemist at UNC told students and staff at the Duke/UNC 15-501 Global Health Dinner Club on April 15. West was joined by Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, at the student-organized dinner discussion about health and the environment.
The 15-501 Global Health Dinner Club is part of a global health initiative between UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke funded by the GlaxoSmithKline Foundation. Organized by students at both UNC and Duke, it brings together UNC and Duke faculty and students several times a year to discuss issues and promote ongoing collaboration.
Although they come from rival schools the two men agreed on the importance of the environment to health and supported each other in making several points:
• that climate change is already happening and will continue to happen during our lifetime and beyond,
• that it is difficult to predict exactly what impact changes humans make to the environment will have, particularly on health, and
• that changes in the environment will most likely result in a higher burden on developing countries because they lack the resources to adapt.
West pointed out that climate change and its effects on health require longer-term thinking than many issues we are used to dealing with.
“The best guess is that even if we completely stopped emitting carbon into the atmosphere today, the existing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could still raise the temperature of the earth about 0.6 degrees Celsius,” he noted. He outlined how climate change could affect health. It could change how much food can be grown in certain regions. It could increase the range of diseases such as malaria. It could create more floods and droughts. It could cause air pollution to be more deadly.
“If you put as your top priority the desire to maintain human life on earth, climate change threatens us in ways many other issues don’t,” he said. “The impact of climate change will be felt most in developing countries not because the change will be more drastic there, but because of the disparity of resources; they simply lack the ability and resources to adapt to the inevitable changes.”
Chameides agreed that climate change is inevitable, and “how we adapt to and minimize the impact of global warming is a large question.” But he noted that climate change is not the only environmental problem that affects health. “We are rapidly putting new synthetic compounds into the environment that we don’t understand,” he said. “The water you are drinking probably has traces of pharmaceutical medicines that have been improperly disposed of by being flushed down the toilet. Nanoparticles that are small enough to cross the blood/brain barrier are used in all sorts of goods – from wrinkle free shirts to plastic food containers. These carbon particles are unregulated and we really have no idea what impact they will have on health.”
But both speakers had reason to hope. “I think that the Nicholas School is in a unique position to help train people who can translate research into environmental projects,” said Chameides. “Particularly in the developing world, we need to have people who understand the science and the practical aspects of making projects work. I dream of educating an army of environmental managers.”
West’s hope is smaller and more personal, but no less important. “When I graduated from Duke, I hadn’t taken the opportunity to travel to a developing country,” he said. “I came away understanding science, but thinking that I didn’t have any way to address the disparities in the world. But working as a visiting scientist in Mexico, I began to see how climate change and economic development could come together. I started an NGO, Solar Mexico, to provide solar electricity for homes, solar ovens for efficient cooking, and solar water distillers for clean drinking water to people in rural communities to improve their lives without degrading the environment. I now understand much better that we need to work on slowing down climate change, but we also have to help developing countries develop infrastructures so they can adapt to changes.”
The April 15 dinner was the final 15/501 Global Health Dinner Club for the 2007-08 academic year. Events happening during 2008-09 academic year will be posted on the calendar of the Duke Global Health Institute website.
