Cool Planet – Healthy People
Dr. Robert Dubrow, Professor Emeritus at Yale School of Public Health and Founding Faculty Director of the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health, has started a monthly publication called Cool Planet – Healthy People on the Substack platform. Each month he will discuss the latest developments in a specific topic related to the public health challenge of the climate crisis. Posts will be published on the first Monday of each month.
“The climate crisis is damaging health, with potentially catastrophic risks ahead. We are seeing illness and death from extreme heat, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and droughts. The crisis is causing increases in vector-borne and other infectious diseases, respiratory, cardiovascular, and kidney diseases, food and water insecurity, and population displacement. Under-resourced, low-income and non-White individuals, communities, and nations, who have contributed least to the crisis, are the hardest hit, making the climate crisis and its adverse effects on health a leading justice issue.
Yet, addressing the crisis presents a major public health opportunity. Converting from dirty fossil fuels to clean energy would prevent millions of premature deaths from air pollution each year. In addition, mitigating climate change in the agricultural sector, urban design, and other domains would yield dramatic health benefits.
In 1967, speaking about his opposition to the war in Vietnam, Martin Luther King said, ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal.’ For at least three decades, silence and inaction about the climate crisis and its unacceptable health harms have represented an ongoing betrayal of all of humanity. In 2015, I decided to join the many people who had raised their voices by founding the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health.
Although I have become professor emeritus and passed on leadership of the Center, I intend to continue to raise my voice. Cool Planet – Healthy People will serve as my vehicle for doing so.
If you are a student, researcher, policymaker, clinician, public health worker, other type of practitioner, educator, or advocate interested in or actively working in this field, or if you are a member of the general public interested in and concerned about the climate-health nexus, then Cool Planet – Healthy People is for you. I encourage you to subscribe.”
Dr. Robert Dubrow receives no financial compensation for producing Cool Planet – Healthy People, which has no paid tier – all posts are free. These posts represent Dr. Dubrow’s own views and not necessarily those of Yale University, the Yale School of Public Health, or the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health.