AP Prewriting

The topic for my Context Project is to examine the correlation between climate change and human health. As climate change intensifies day by day, related problems like environmental pollution, declined sea level, and increased prevalence of diseases are exposed. These all lead to one major detriment, the decline of human health. Each year, tens of thousands of people lose their lives because of extreme weather, natural hazards, lack of food, and exposure to disease. If the governments and relevant departments do not take adequate precautions, the ultimate consequences will be destructive. It is therefore essential to understand what strategies will be the most beneficial and effective for solving the issue. 

Faced with declining human health, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has taken over much of the work. They have developed a series of policies to deal with the negative effects of climate change. Specifically, CDC has focused on implementing Building Resilience Against Climate Effects (BRACE), a five-step process aiming to help departments build prevention strategies. BRACE mainly advocates that it is crucial to construct policies that are best suited to the different circumstances and conditions in each area. According to the resource, “the CDC guide on vulnerability assessment provides a suggested sequence of steps that health departments can undertake to use local data to assess health vulnerabilities associated with climate change”. This has greatly improved the effectiveness of the preventing actions, since a unified policy is not well suited to the effects of climate change on all regions. In order to better popularize BRACE in more cities, CDC also established the Climate-Ready States and Cities Initiative (CRSCI) to fund states, cities, and institutions to help them launch BRACE. By building an extensive funding system, BRACE will be utilized more widely. 

Another solution to mitigate health problems caused by climate change is to put more effort on avoiding the damages led by extreme weathers and natural hazards as much as possible. This requires long-term planning and careful strategic planning. According to the article Population Health Adaptation Approaches to the Increasing Severity and Frequency of Weather-Related Disasters Resulting From our Changing Climate, there are multiple approaches that can be effective for both the local governments and public health departments to implement. The primary one is to increase knowledge and tools for emergency response to natural disasters. Particularly for governments, knowing how to assess damages and take actions are essential for alleviating the consequences of climate change. Moreover, as emphasized in the article, governments and related departments should “develop a metric to quantify the severity of weather-related disasters at the local level and explore the non-monotonic and spatiotemporal health impacts of these events”. The idea is to develop more targeted and predetermined strategies based on the population and weather patterns of different areas. In fact, providing systematic teaching about natural hazards to the public is also necessary; this can largely reduce the possibility of not knowing how to respond. 

These two solutions will largely require the cooperation of the government, the CDC, and public health authorities. Of course, taking climate change out of the picture from human health requires concerted action across all the departments and far-reaching strategies. Human beings may not be able to stop climate change, but it is still possible to minimize its consequences.

Works cited:

Runkle, Jennifer, et al. “Population Health Adaptation Approaches to the Increasing Severity and Frequency of Weather-Related Disasters Resulting from Our Changing Climate: A Literature Review and Application to Charleston, South Carolina.” Current Environmental Health Reports, Springer International Publishing, 8 Nov. 2018, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs40572-018-0223-y. 

Schramm, P.J., Ahmed, M., Siegel, H. et al. Climate Change and Health: Local Solutions to Local Challenges. Curr Envir Health Rpt 7, 363–370 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40572-020-00294-1