Past Event
Online & In-Person
Seminar

Temperature Is a Vital Sign: Climate Change and Population Health in Alaska

Open to the Public

This seminar highlighted the efforts of physicians from Massachusetts General Hospital’s Division of Space, Ecological, Arctic, and Resource Limited Medicine to create a program of health monitoring with colleagues in the Northwest Arctic Borough of Alaska to quantify and qualify the impacts of climate change on human health through the lens of emergency medical care.

Emergency room sign in both English and Iñupiaq

Climate change is a healthcare emergency.

In the Arctic, rapid warming is exacerbating pre-existing health inequities and introducing novel threats to health, particularly among rural and Indigenous populations. These threats include injury and death due to extreme weather events, reduced access to traditional foods, reduced mobility, mental and social stress due to loss of community and culture, and increased exposure to infectious diseases and toxins from thawing permafrost.

Urgent action is needed to protect the health and wellbeing of Arctic residents – and because threats to human health in Arctic populations are an indicator of threats to come in more temperate latitudes. Yet national and international policymakers have been slow to recognize the linkages between climate change and population health.

Recording

A white silhouette of a head on a crimson background.
Panelist

Paul Forward

Family Medicine Physician, Maniilaq Health Center
A white silhouette of a head on a crimson background.
Panelist

L. Suzanne Leslie

Wildnerness Medicine Fellow, Massachusetts General Hospital
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