Articles

The Arctic region faces unique risks and challenges as a result of both the COVID-19 pandemic and the actions taken to respond to it. Research offers an important opportunity to understand the region’s unique conditions and characteristics for pandemic management. This article contributes to this knowledge building effort by surveying the literature that explicitly focuses on COVID-19 in the Arctic between 2020 and 2022. The authors analyze this emerging body of work with a focus on identifying overarching trends and map the themes and topics considered in this literature with a focus on highlighting topics that are prominent and those that are conspicuously underrepresented.

Arctic Initiative affiliate Dr. Lorenzo Albala discusses the challenges - and rewards - of practicing emergency medicine in the city of Kotzebue, Alaska. 

The global demand for desalinated water is increasing at a remarkable rate. In a future with increasing demand for water and low-carbon electricity, an interesting ecological dilemma emerges. In a decarbonized world, providing desalinated water for domestic use and aquatic ecological restoration could increasingly come at the expense of open space lost to renewables such as solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind turbines. In this article we examine the environmental tradeoffs of providing freshwater from desalination under a solar photovoltaic-based decarbonization strategy, using Israel as an example.

Many countries across the Middle East and North Africa, or MENA, region have faced critical challenges in ensuring the effective and equitable vaccination of their citizens against COVID-19. With a few exceptions, like Morocco, Israel and several Gulf states, countries in the region have faced difficulties in securing sufficient doses due to logistical constraints, poor planning and vaccine hesitancy. As of mid-August, only 21 percent of the region’s population had received at least one dose, and less than 13 percent were fully vaccinated. This puts the region far behind the developing country average of 36 percent with at least one dose and 22 percent fully vaccinated. Moreover, while some countries have accelerated their vaccination campaigns under the pressure of recent COVID-19 surges, other campaigns seem to be slowing or stalling. As countries brace for new waves of the pandemic, MENA governments—and their international supporters—must find ways to address the root causes of their halting vaccination campaigns.

The Hospital Surge Preparedness and Response Index is an all-hazards template developed by a group of emergency management and disaster medicine experts from the United States.

This article revisits the Cutter Incident in the United States in April 1955 when mass-produced doses of polio vaccine containing insufficiently inactivated (killed) live polio virus were released to the U.S. public. The Cutter Incident also affected subsequent vaccine development and these lessons remain relevant in the international quest to create a rapidly developed vaccine for COVID-19. The Cutter Incident shows how things can go wrong when a vaccine is manufactured in haste and without adequate safety precautions during mass-production

After the emergence of the respiratory virus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), many exposure and environmental health scientists promptly recognized the potentially catastrophic public health ramifications of concurrent infectious and air pollution-mediated disease. Nevertheless, much of this attention has been focused on outdoor interactions. Each year, 3.8 million people worldwide prematurely die from illnesses attributable to indoor air. Hence, poor household indoor air quality is a long-standing public health issue with even greater relevance now that many individuals are spending more time at home.

CNN security expert and Cambridge mother of three Juliette Kayyem has plenty to say about Donald Trump, Boston's recovery, and staying safe this summer.

The peer-reviewed update of ENRP's ongoing research on renewable hydrogen is featured in the June volume of Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, an academic journal of which Dr. Nicola de Blasio is now also an editor.

In developing countries, where the coronavirus pandemic is potentially at its most dangerous and costly, the authors call for governments to work with academic institutions to build and sustain computational modelling capacity.