A Healthy Response to Climate Change
Event Details
For too long we’ve put health and the environment in different boxes. The work of our generation of healthcare providers and researchers is to bridge the two, to understand that optimizing planetary health, “the health of human civilization and the state of the natural systems on which it depends” must be our goal. One of our most urgent tasks is to plan and implement a healthy response to climate change–called the “greatest threat to global health in the 21st century” by the World Health Organization. Happily, solutions exist which improve health right now: the Lancet says that tackling climate change could be the greatest public health opportunity of our time, and calls on the health profession to provide leadership to help drive the low-carbon transition. Progress has begun, work is accelerating, and the team is building: come learn specific targets for action and research that will channel our efforts into the healthy response to climate change that our patients and our children deserve.
Courtney Howard
Steering Committee
Vice-Chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance
Courtney is a Yellowknife ER doctor and Board President of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE). Motivated by work on a Médecins Sans Frontières pediatric malnutrition project, and by climate-related health impacts on her majority-Indigenous Northern patient population, she led the successful campaign to have the Canadian Medical Association divest from fossil fuels. With CAPE she helps to organize MD-advocacy across Canada and has been involved in work on active transport, plant-rich diets, health impact assessments, carbon pricing, coal phase-out, and the health impacts of fracking.
Research-wise, she led “FLOW,” an RCT comparing tampons to menstrual cups, and is finishing up “SOS! Summer of Smoke,” a study into NWT’s extreme wildfire season of 2014, done under the direction of Dr James Orbinski. Courtney was first author on the Canadian Public Health Association and Lancet Countdown on Climate Change’s “2017 Briefing for Canadian Policymakers,” represents CAPE on the board of the Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA), and was honoured to present at the GCHA/World Health Organization summit at COP23.
Her TEDx Talk: “Healthy People, Healthy Planet” is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgIYaklWOK4 and her blog about a recent clinical teaching trip to Health in Harmony/ASRI’s Planetary Health site in Borneo can be read here: https://drcourtneyhoward.ca/blog/. Dr Howard has won the Canadian College of Family Physicians (CFPC) Environmental Leadership Award and its Mimi Divinsky Award for History and Narrative in Family Medicine, as well as the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians Alan Drummond Advocacy Award.
Dr Howard tweets @courtghoward.