Our Focus: Health Benefits as a Pathway to Move from Climate Ambition to Climate Action

Program overview, goals and expected results

Climate change, if not strongly mitigated, is expected to be the greatest environmental and health challenge of the 21st Century.  While nations around the world have pledged Climate Ambitions, the practical pathways to motivating and achieving climate action are less clear.  However, the human health co-benefits of many mitigative actions can be a major motivator of local and immediate climate action. Indeed, the Lancet Health and Climate Commission has declared that the mitigative actions we take can have the potential to be the greatest public health opportunity of the 21st Century (Watts et al, 2015).  These actions can include changes in our societal diets, life styles (e.g., active transportation), sustainable development, and greener (and cleaner) energy choices, resulting in improved cardiovascular and other human health co-benefits (Thurston et al, 2018; Pinkerton and Rom, 2021; de Nazelle A et al, 2021; Negev et al, 2022). Identifying ways to take these potential health motivators from theory to action is the goal of this meeting.

The overall aim of the workshop is to efficiently and effectively disseminate knowledge of health co-benefits, and their great potential when incorporated into climate action and negotiations at the COP, as well as to identify transdisciplinary, practicable policy-feasible ways of enactment in day-to-day government decision-making. To achieve this, the purposes of this Workshop would be multiple. First, we propose to hold this meeting in the week prior to the Conference of Parties (COP28) Climate conference to be held in the UAE at the end of November, 2023. 

This workshop will highlight climate mitigation health opportunities prior to the climate negotiations to follow in the next week (e.g., by sending a press release at the end of the conference, and through participation by our participants in that COP meeting).  Conveniently, many of the meeting participants will be able to leverage the Workshop travel funding to attend the COP28 meeting and share our NYU-Abu Dhabi meeting message, compounding the benefit of the Workshop. Secondly, we will conduct dissemination of the meeting’s scientific content by developing a Workshop Report for publication, under the auspices of the ISEE Policy Committee (of which Dr. Thurston is a member) in a high impact scientific journal (e.g., Epidemiology, the journal of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, ISEE).

The Specific Aims of the proposed meeting are to:

a.    Bring together scientists, policy analysts, and government representatives to present and share knowledge regarding the potential climate benefits from public health steps, determine ways to employ public health measures to also attain climate. action at the same time, and to identify public health proposals to mitigate climate change, in the expectation of their further in-person dissemination at the subsequent COP meeting in Dubai.

b.    Develop plans for a scientific Workshop Report for publication in a high impact journal (the half-day of the second and last day of the meeting), in association with the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology Policy Committee, of which Dr. Thurston is a member. This will include both a summary of the scientific evidence for climate health co-benefits, and an implementation component that identifies potential practical decisionmaker avenues to advance co-benefits in policy implementations.  This will be followed by a policy brief integrating possibly policy feedback and feasible practical actions. Actual writing and further coordination of the Report and policy briefing will occur by writing subgroups, and coordinated by Dr. Thurston via subsequent ZOOM meetings over the following six months, in a manner similar to that employed in the Workshop Report that Dr. Thurston led and published for the American Thoracic Society on “What Constitutes an Adverse Health Effect of Air Pollution” (Thurston et al, 2017).

c.     Disseminate the meeting presentation information internationally in real-time by having the scientific sessions available publicly, as well as via development of the Workshop Report to be published within one year.

Note: The campus map showing where the NYUAD Conference Center is located is on the web here:

https://nyuad.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyuad/about/contacts-and-location/campus-map-conference-center-a6.pdf