PrintHuman Health, Food, and Water
I'm going to tell you a secret about climate change. It was never about the polar bears.
What do I mean by that? Often, it seems the messaging around the urgency to act on climate change gets lost in photos of forlorn-looking polar bears drifting on chunks of ice. Save the polar bears!!! The ice is melting and the polar bears will die. And, certainly polar bears are vulnerable to climate change (see this WWF Polar Bears and Climate Change Assessment). But, my point is that we've been focusing on the wrong messaging about why we should care about climate change. While I don't like the idea of polar bears, or any species, experiencing negative impacts of a changing climate, I might not be inspired to act save polar bears because they feel kind of distant to me. Quite simply, we never should have made polar bears the unofficial mascots of climate action when ultimately, solving the climate crisis is something we need to do for our own well-being as a species.
If there's one thing we can say about humans, it's that we're inherently selfish (it's an evolutionary necessity in some ways). If we focus our climate change messaging on impacts that we feel much, much closer to home, we might just be able to inspire action. (And here, 'action' denotes not only action to address the causes of climate change but also action to respond to these possibly dangerous impacts.) So, for this week, we'll set our affinity for the fluffy white polar bears aside and worry about what climate change is already doing to people.
What will we learn?
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
- define the direct and indirect impacts of climate change on human health and discuss types and examples;
- identify and discuss factors beyond climate change that are fundamental to the good health of an individual and a society;
- explain the stressors of a changing climate on food security at various geographic scales;
- evaluate the interconnected nature of food security, climate change, population growth, and development;
- describe the impacts of climate change on water quantity and water quality.
What is due this week?
This lesson will take us one week to complete. Please refer to the corresponding module in Canvas for specific assignments, deliverables, and due dates.
Questions?
If you have questions, please feel free to post them to the "Have a question about the lesson?" discussion forum in Canvas. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help a classmate.