Creating a Climate & Health Academic Concentration

Executive Summary:

Kiran is developing a climate change health concentration for Fielding School of Public Health’s Environmental Health Sciences for students to be able to specialize in understanding the relationship between climate change impact and human health. The aim is to also be solution-oriented, by encouraging students to take coursework in climate resilience and sustainability to assess solutions for equity and application to impacted communities with a public health lens. Additionally, this project aims to create a pathway for students who want to also engage with issues of environmental injustice in communities of marginalized identities and focus on health outcomes for solutions within the climate crisis. The concentration is being created in collaboration with the Center for Healthy Climate Solutions at FSPH as well as other faculty within the EHS department.

Report:
This project is specifically regarding a climate change and health concentration for the Environmental Health Sciences. Our department has a focus on occupational health and understanding impacts on the natural environment, but as climate change becomes a larger, more urgent issue for our society, it becomes imperative to have public health practioners be a part of this effort. The hope is to create a pathway for students to research climate change health impacts as well as climate resilience efforts and solutions. The curriculum requirements are interpolated with competencies that help with skill development for students who aim to go into climate resiliency and the sustainability field. As someone who is focused on the cross-section between climate change and health, I am excited to develop a potential concentration for students who come to Fielding to focus their studies on understanding how climate change is affecting vulnerable populations as well as being solution-oriented and incorporating cross-disciplinary efforts to do so.
The hope is to create more public health practitioners who are able to engage in the sustainability space. As mentioned in our courses, there are impacts of every sustainability effort, and that includes public health impacts. Being able to engage practitioners who are specialized in project development as well as measuring impact helps to ensure that solutions that are being derived are equitable. Further, the hope is to have students who are interested in climate change and health also be invested in resilience and sustainability to encourage a solutions-oriented approach to our efforts that is also vested in supporting impacted communities. The output is to be a complete proposal and presentation for EHS faculty to encourage the addition of climate change and health concentration. The hope is that it can be enacted for students in our department in the future.

This is a collaboration between myself, the faculty, and the Center of Healthy Climate Solutions within the Fielding. With faculty, I was advised by our chair Dr. Rachael Jones to understand the requirements of developing a concentration. I am also working with Dr. Katherine McNamara to support creating specific requirements as well as hope the concentration can be co-signed by the Center to further develop the concentration.
As the lead on the development of this concentration, I am aiming to first do an analysis of climate and climate health jobs to understand what skills are necessary and create appropriate competencies for the master’s program. From there, I will aim to edit the preexisting Master’s requirements to also address the skills that we have determined, such as encouraging students to find a fieldwork experience that deals with climate change or taking an additional course that discusses climate management. We will then create a description of the concentration that highlights why it was created as well as its relevance to the department. We hope to also create a list of recommended courses that students can take as electives and create a unit requirement of climate change-related coursework that students have to take.