COVID-19 and Climate: Implications for Public Health

Climate One

News, News Commentary, Science, Earth Sciences, Social Sciences

4.7 • 583 Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2020

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What can the spread of coronavirus teach us about the spread of climate change? Both crises have global reach, invisible perpetrators, and require aggressive, early action for containment. But while an infectious disease is acute and deeply personal, the impacts of a changing climate are systemic and vague. Scientists point out that the coronavirus family — which includes COVID-19 and SARS — originated as an animal disease that can be passed along to humans. With increased human development encroaching into wildlife areas, should communities be preparing for more pandemics? Visit climateone.org/watch-and-listen/podcasts for more information on today's episode. Guests: Brian Allan, Associate Entomology Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Aaron Bernstein, Interim Director, The Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Harvard C-CHANGE) Barbara Gottlieb, Director of Environment and Health, Physicians for Social Responsibility Additional interviews: Jason Rohr, Professor at the University of Notre Dame This program was recorded at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on April 3, 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	What do climate change and the COVID pandemic have in common when it comes to public health?
0:07.6	Climate One conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats,
0:13.0	the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge. I'm Greg Dalton.
0:18.4	Human incursion into remote ecosystems can have far-reaching effects on our health and well-being.
0:24.3	Deforestation and changes in land use, often to produce food, disrupt delicate, ecological, and water
0:30.0	systems.
0:30.6	They also facilitate new and potentially dangerous interactions between people and other organisms.
0:36.7	And those are the contacts between humans and animals that keep disease biologists up at night,
0:41.3	because those are the best opportunities for spillover events to occur.
0:45.3	Brian Allen is Associate Professor of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
0:51.3	He studies the ecology of infectious diseases, particularly those transmitted by the bite of
0:55.9	infected ticks and mosquitoes. The novel coronavirus that jumped from bats to humans is highlighting
1:01.5	how challenging it can be to manage infectious disease. We're finding that treating COVID-19
1:07.4	is extremely difficult. Well, it's going to be more difficult or virtually impossible
1:11.9	to treat climate change. You can't treat climate change. Barbara Gottlieb is Director of Environment
1:17.9	and Health at Physicians for Social Responsibility, where she guides national work on climate,
1:22.7	energy, and air quality. She authored PSR's reports on the health implications of fossil fuels, including
1:28.7	too dirty, too dangerous, why health professionals reject natural gas and coal's assault on human
1:35.1	health. Action to safeguard the climate has paled in comparison to the response to the coronavirus.
1:41.3	What we need to do now is recognize that we have a window of opportunity to really flatten
1:45.7	the curve when it comes to climate change.
1:48.2	Aaron Bernstein is interim director of the Center for Climate Health and the Global Environment
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