My CP is centered on the correlation between climate change and human health. Climate change has caused many negative phenomena, including global warming, falling sea levels, air pollution, the spread of diseases and so on. There is no doubt that human beings are also negatively impacted due to these environmental changes, sometimes the consequences can be even destructive. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how to alleviate the bad influences climate change has on human health and try to implement related policies as soon as possible. The most important helpful source I found for my Advocacy project is an article, called Climate Change and Health: Local Solutions to Local Challenges. This article mainly introduces how local governments and disease departments should prevent the negative consequences brought by climate change, as well as current problems and future challenges people are facing.
The article is separated into four main sections: introduction, approaches that have been done so far, case studies, and conclusion. The introduction discusses specific impacts of climate change on human health, and difficulties local governments across the US are facing. Additionally, the authors provided several suggestions in order to make the prevention policies more efficient; one of the most important pieces of advice is that the The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and governments should construct prevention strategies independently based on the characteristics of different areas. The second section emphasizes the measures that CDC is currently working on and provides detailed explanations to describe the specific contents of their work. For example, CDC has launched the CRSCI project, which holds the purpose of funding several areas in solving climate change related health issues. The third section, case studies, researches the negative influences in given areas, including New York City, Indian tribal community, and Minnesota. Specifically, the authors introduced different coping strategies used by local governments, such as the “be a buddy” program for NYC and BRACE framework for the Indian tribe, to deal with regional different human health consequences caused by climate. Lastly, the conclusion part summarized problems that have been solved and existed challenges and difficulties. It is worth noting that addressing the impact of climate change requires the joint action of multiple departments. In other words, a single department or government is not able to solve the problem comprehensively.
The reason I think this article is so important for my topic is because it provides detailed and sweeping solutions in understanding the prevention of climate change. It also gives constructive advice on how to effectively moderate the negative consequences, which is consistent with the perspectives made in other articles. This will greatly help me with my AP, since I also agree with the proposals this article gave. According to the authors, “strong national coordination and effective institutions can bolster local adaptive capacity”, indicating that governments should adapt to local conditions and frame specialized polies. At the same time, the work that has been done so far is not enough to control the influences caused by climate change, so it is essential to further strengthen the work of all departments and unite together for common defense.