Jonathan Patz, MD, spoke at Sustain Dane’s Badger Bioneers Conference. His research looks at relationships between the environment and human health. He noted that with climate change, it’s often hard for people to identify risks to our health and well-being.
“When we looked at the hole in the ozone, you could see that there was an immediate health threat in increased skin cancer; there was an immediate technical solution in banning CFCs,” he said.
“But with climate, we can’t point to that storm, that heat wave, that disease outbreak and say, ‘Climate change caused this.’” So Patz and his colleagues at the UW Global Health Institute and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies are focusing on how our activities can have less impact on the climate while also improving our health.
