Environmental Health Sciences

A. Overall Objectives

High quality, action-oriented science lies at the core of the Columbia Climate and Health Program’s mission.  We have identified two broad domains of scientific discovery in which the Program is likely to have unique and powerful leverage over the next 5 years. These are:

•  Research on mechanisms, emerging trends, and future impacts.

Climate change affects health through complex mechanisms connecting changes in the global atmosphere, regional ecology, population social structures, human exposures and behaviors, physiological responses, and bio-molecular changes. Within this complex system, our research aims to elucidate mechanisms, to identify climate signals in long-term health outcome trends, and to project impacts into the future under plausible climate scenarios.  Current research projects examine effects of heat waves on urban mortality and adverse birth outcomes, effects of humidity extremes on episodic meningitis and influenza outbreaks, and climate influences on work productivity. 

•  Health benefits from greenhouse pollutant mitigation activities.

Many policies that reduce greenhouse pollutant emissions (e.g., CO2, methane, black carbon) also deliver immediate and localized environmental benefits (often called ancillary benefits or co-benefits).  While this point is often made, rigorous efforts to quantify local, short-term benefits are scarce.  The Program is developing and applying new methods to assess health co-benefits of emerging climate mitigation policies, with a focus on urban areas including New York City.  Our goal is to support NYC’s global leadership in sustainable urban development, addressing benefits for health relating to improved air quality, urban heat island, and quality of life measures.

B. Projects

•  New York Climate and Health Project (NYCHP)

With funding from the US Environmental Protection Agency, the NYCHP developed an integrated modeling framework capable of providing regional projections of climate and air quality under alternative scenarios of global climate change and regional land use change. The integrated framework has been used to assess potential public health impacts of both extreme heat events and ozone air quality over the coming century in the New York metropolitan region.

•  ClimAid: Integrated Assessment for Effective Climate Change Adaptation Strategies in New York State - Funded by NYSERDA

The goals of the ClimAID are to provide New York State decision-makers with cutting-edge information on its vulnerability to as well as its ability to derive benefits from climate change and to facilitate the development of adaptation strategies informed by both local experience and scientific knowledge. Further aims of ClimAID are to highlight areas related to climate change and New York State that warrant additional research and to identify data gaps and monitoring needs in order to help guide future efforts.

•  CCRun: Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast  - Funded by NOAA

The goal of CCRun is to develop a coordinated nodal Climate Services delivery system for the region. Encompassing the Boston-to-Philadelphia corridor, CCRun will serve stakeholder needs in assessing and managing risks from climate variability and change. Initial projects for the CCRUN RISA will be focused in three broad thematic areas: water, health, and coastal zones.  Our work focuses on reducing vulnerability to heat and air pollution events in the region now and in the future.

•  Climate, Pollen and Allergic Diseases

This pilot study takes advantage of well-documented gradients of CO2 concentrations and temperatures on a rural to urban transect of the NYC metropolitan area to examine how this gradient affects tree pollen production and individual immune responses.

•  The role of airborne dust and climate in meningococcal meningitis outbreaks in the Sahel

Meningococcal meningitis (MM) occurs throughout the world but attack rates in the countries lying within the semi-arid region south of the Sahara, known as the ‘meningitis belt’, are many times higher than those seen in any other part of the world. The reason for the susceptibility of this part of Africa to major epidemics of MM is not fully understood, but it appears to be due, at least in part, to the unique climatic features of this region. This project is aimed at investigating near surface atmospheric dust characteristics specific to the meningitis belt including mass concentration and elemental composition and their variability during the year and during the meningitis season (dry season). It is expected that the concentration and composition analyses will help formulating hypotheses relative to the specific mechanisms leading to such high MM incidence rates in the meningitis belt.