Many companies emit carbon dioxide in the course of their normal business. The amount emitted may differ — an airline or fossil fuel-based energy producer will emit much more carbon than a textile manufacturer.

To offset those emissions, some companies purchase carbon credits through brokers or exchanges. Those credits are meant to fund projects that reduce or capture pollutants.

Companies can also buy credits from project developers. Forestry projects are common, since trees capture carbon during photosynthesis. Projects might aim to preserve a swath of trees from destruction, or plant new ones. The forests saved or replenished can be anywhere in the world.

Companies buy carbon credits for various reasons. They are often the cornerstone of company public relations statements that they are carbon neutral, or they have “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions.

A big question for journalists investigating the growing voluntary carbon market is whether claims of carbon neutrality are true.

Companies don’t necessarily have to buy offsets to help the environment. They can reduce emissions produced by one part of their business to make up for other parts where they can’t reduce them.

But changing business processes to reduce emissions can be difficult.

That’s a big reason why offsets are so commonly used in carbon neutrality claims. According to a 2021 study of such pledges from 35 large global firms, 66% of them used carbon offsets.

Another wrinkle in carbon neutrality claims: Products companies make may produce pollutants when consumers or other businesses use them. In gas fuel production, for example, there is carbon emitted to refine gas, and carbon emitted to make the energy that powers the refinery.

Then there is the carbon emitted when someone burns the fuel to drive their car. For firms working in those industries, more than 90% of greenhouse gas emissions don’t come from the company itself, according to the 2021 study, from the Columbia Center on Sustainable Development.

The growing voluntary carbon market

Though many companies purchase carbon offsets voluntarily there are two U.S. states, California and Washington, which regulate their biggest polluters using market mechanisms. Most states in the northeastern U.S. have binding regulations that do the same, but they focus on energy producers.

The voluntary market, valued at about $2 billion in 2020, could be worth $250 billion by 2025, according to a 2023 research memo from investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Companies access vital information about offset markets through registries, which are usually nonprofits. Registries record credit ownership, for example. Registries also have protocols, or rules, on how projects measure their carbon reductions. Protocols are meant to ensure carbon offsetting projects produce the environmental benefits claimed.

While records in states that regulate carbon emissions are likely to be subject to public record laws, records for voluntary carbon offsets are not. But the major registries make some data public.

Another question for journalists to ask is whether a carbon-saving project would have happened anyway without carbon credits being purchased.

Did carbon credits save that forest? Or was that forest in no danger of being cut down?

A major challenge in reporting on carbon offsets is disparate sources offer data in various formats — registries may use different phrases to note that a carbon credit has been issued, for example.

Those differences make market-wide analyses difficult and time consuming.

OffsetsDB from CarbonPlan

Enter OffsetsDB, a navigable and standardized repository of carbon offset data from five of the biggest registries operating in the voluntary carbon offset market: American Carbon Registry, ART TREES, Climate Action Reserve, Gold Standard and Verra.

The free tool is updated daily and produced by CarbonPlan, a nonprofit open data organization focusing on climate change solutions. Anyone can download the data and access documentation for carbon offset projects around the world.

To help journalists understand the offset market and get to know OffsetsDB, we recently hosted an hourlong webinar featuring Grayson Badgley, a research scientist at CarbonPlan, and longtime science journalist Maggie Koerth, editorial lead at CarbonPlan.

“I really genuinely believe that at the core of just about every single project there’s this nugget of truth,” Badgley said during the webinar. “There is this good thing that is happening. The real question is, is it being credited appropriately?”

Watch the video to learn more — and read four takeaways from the presentation and conversation.

1. Know these key terms before digging into offset data.

There are lots of specialized words and phrases in the world of carbon offsets.

Here are a few you need to know.

Additionality: This refers to whether a carbon-saving or carbon-reducing project funded by carbon credits is adding environmental benefits that couldn’t have existed without the credits.

Credit: A credit is a financial instrument that represents carbon-removing activities. Credits are often created by projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere, such as reforestation, or prevent it from reaching the atmosphere, such as landfills that capture and burn methane.

“Many [companies] buy credits,” Koerth said. “And that is, somebody else does the carbon removing activity and then sells the company the right to claim that removed carbon.”

Offsets: Credits become offsets when a company or other entity makes a claim, such as carbon neutrality, based on the credits they’ve purchased. The company is claiming that their carbon emitting activities are offset by the credits.

“The terms credit and offset are kind of used interchangeably because the majority of credits are ultimately used to make offsetting claims,” Koerth said.

Registry: A registry is an organization, typically a nonprofit, that tracks carbon credit markets, including the buying and selling, issuance and retirement of carbon credits.

“[Registries] keep a record of all the credits produced by a project when they’re sold, when the sold credits have officially been used,” Koerth said. “Basically, this whole system of the registries exists so that the same credits can’t be sold multiple times to different people.”

Issuance: When a credit has been created, registered, and a registry confirms it exists, the registry issues the credit.

Purchase: When a credit is bought, typically by companies seeking to offset their carbon-producing activities. While credit issuances and retirements are publicly available, purchase information is usually not public.

Retirement: When the buyer of a credit declares they have used the credit and put it toward an offsetting goal, the credit is retired. Retired credits can’t be used again.

Vintage: This is the year a carbon credit was created.

Carbon neutral or net zero: These are claims companies make that their carbon emissions are balanced, for example, by buying credits. Say a small coal plant emits 900 million metric tons of carbon each year. It then buys credits equaling 900 million metric tons in carbon offsetting activities. On net, the coal plant claims to be neutral in their emissions.

There are many more phrases to know in the world of carbon offsets. The U.K.-based news organization Carbon Brief offers an extensive glossary.

2. Understand additionality.

Additionality is a big word with a big question behind it: Would a carbon sequestration or reduction project have happened anyway without funding from carbon credits?

Journalists need a basic understanding of additionality, a crucial concept that carbon offset projects use to justify their existence.

“In practice, determining whether a proposed project is additional requires comparing it to a hypothetical scenario without revenue from the sale of carbon credits,” according to this explainer on additionality from the nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute.

In other words, is the sale of carbon credits adding environmental benefits by funding a carbon offsetting project that could not have happened without that funding?

“A lot of this is based around both trying to see what you have done and trying to estimate what would have happened if you hadn’t done that thing,” Koerth said during the webinar.

As Badgley and Freya Chay write in a 2023 analysis for CarbonPlan, “Rather than creating new climate benefits, non-additional credits simply reward a landowner for doing what they already planned on doing.”

While there are no hard and fast rules for determining whether a project is adding carbon benefits, journalists and others can use data in OffsetsDB to identify projects that potentially are not.

Think of a hypothetical landfill. Landfills produce methane, which scientists consider a worse air pollutant than carbon dioxide. But when methane is burned, it turns into carbon dioxide. So the landfill burns methane and receives carbon credits it can sell on the offset market because the carbon it is emitting is not as bad for the environment as methane.

Badgley and Chay recently analyzed 14 such carbon offset landfill projects. If a landfill stops receiving carbon credits to sell, the methane burns at those landfills should drop off or stop — if those projects are adding environmental benefits that wouldn’t be possible without the credits.

That’s not what Badgley and Chay found.

“By comparing crediting data from the Climate Action Reserve with landfill gas collection data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, we found that nearly 50 percent of the credits issued under this protocol are likely non-additional,” they write. “These credits do not represent high-quality outcomes for the climate.”

For example, the Resource Recovery Landfill project in Cherryvale, Kansas, received credits from 2006 to 2011 for its gas collection operations, including burning methane, according to the analysis.

In 2012, those credits stopped — the landfill didn’t file paperwork to keep them going, Badgley and Chay found. But the gas collection continued. Crediting began again in 2022. During those 10 years, the landfill’s gas collection didn’t disappear or slow down. It expanded, according to the analysis.

“To be clear, the fact that Resource Recovery’s gas collection system ran continuously is a good thing for the planet,” write Badgley and Chay. “In addition to reducing methane emissions, collecting and treating landfill gas can help reduce smells and other environmental side effects associated with operating a landfill. But offsets must be used to spur new climate action — not just reward existing actions.”

(CarbonPlan)

3. Know that parts of the carbon offset market aren’t disclosed in public registry data — but this information may exist elsewhere.

Offset credit purchases, for example, are not usually public information. Other transaction details are also missing in public data.

For example, OffsetsDB shows that Jaiprakash Hydro Power in India has issued 16.7 million credits and retired nearly 9 million since 2010.

But which entities bought and retired those credits is potentially unavailable.

Sometimes, companies will voluntarily disclose to registries that they have purchased or are retiring credits.

But that doesn’t always happen.

Company sustainability reports are one place to look for information on how many credits a company has retired, and why, Badgley said. A company might, for example, purchase carbon credits to offset executive travel and publicly disclose that for public relations purposes.

“What we’re hoping to do with OffsetsDB is start to pull in a lot of that information,” Badgley said, adding that it’s a manual process of gathering supplementary knowledge from places like sustainability reports and news articles. This appears as a timeline for individual carbon offset projects within the database.

(CarbonPlan)

Recent legislation passed in California requires that any company marketing or selling carbon credits in the state, or any company buying or selling credits, disclose much more information online.

This includes the type of offset project, where the project is located, whether a third party has verified the project, and more. (But it’s unclear when the law will take effect and how it will be enforced, Politico reports.)

“This is something that we’re really excited about,” Badgley said. “And we’re hoping to be able to sort of pull that paperwork and pull that information into OffsetsDB.”

4. Ask about registry buffer pools.

What happens when a carbon-emitting company buys credits from, say, a forestry project in northern California that later is subsumed by wildfire? The registry that issued the credits will likely dip into its buffer pool to make up for the loss.

A buffer pool is a sort of rainy day fund, made up of carbon credits reserved for emergencies. Usually a carbon offsetting project can’t sell all its credits, but has to put a fraction of them into the registry’s buffer pool, Badgley said.

While the practice “makes total sense,” Badley said, it also raises questions. What types of credits are in the buffer pool? Do replacement credits represent similar offsetting projects to the original ones?

Here’s a relevant question for journalists to ask of registries: “Is this buffer pool that this program is administering, is it designed to make good on the liabilities of the program for the next X years?” Badgley said.

Further reading

Another Forest Offset Project is Burning — If You Know Where to Look
Grayson Badgley. CarbonPlan, July 2024.

The First Offset Credits Approved by a Major Integrity Program Don’t Make the Grade
Grayson Badgley and Freya Chay. CarbonPlan, July 2024.

Reporter’s Guide to Investigating Carbon Offsets
Global Investigative Journalism Network. Toby McIntosh, March 2024.

Instead of Carbon Offsets, We Need ‘Contributions’ to Forests
Libby Blanchard, William R.L. Anderegg and Barbara K. Haya. Stanford Social Innovation Review, January 2024.

What Every Leader Needs to Know About Carbon Credits
Varsha Ramesh Walsh and Michael W. Toffel. Harvard Business Review, December 2023.

Glossary: Carbon Brief’s Guide to the Terminology of Carbon Offsets
Daisy Dunne and Josh Gabbatiss. Carbon Brief, September 2023.

In-Depth Q&A: Can ‘Carbon Offsets’ Help to Tackle Climate Change?
Josh Gabbatiss, et. al. Carbon Brief, September 2023.

Action Needed to Make Carbon Offsets From Forest Conservation Work for Climate Change Mitigation
Thales West, et. al. Science, August 2023.

The Voluntary Carbon Market: Climate Finance at an Inflection PointBriefing Paper. World Economic Forum, January 2023.

Corporate Net-Zero Pledges: The Bad and the Ugly
Jack Arnold and Perrine Toledano. Columbia Center on Sustainable Development, November 2021.

The post Carbon offsets: 4 things journalists need to understand appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Trade winds usually push warm water across the Pacific westward toward Oceania and Asia, causing cold water to surface along the coastlines of the tropical Americas, including parts of Mexico, Central America and South America.

But every few years, trade winds weaken during the early spring, and warmer water settles around these coasts and into the mid-Pacific.

This phenomenon is part of a broader climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The warm phase of ENSO is simply called El Niño. Stronger than usual trade winds, by contrast, push warm water westward, allowing more cool water to surface and bringing a La Niña pattern. El Niño and La Niña occur naturally, though recent research suggests climate change is affecting these patterns.

Fishermen in Peru first identified warmer than usual waters in the Pacific during the 1600s, and named the phenomenon “El Niño de Navidad,” since it often occurred near Christmas. Usually the rising, nutrient-rich cool waters brought a wealth of sea life to their nets. But once in a while, the bounty would shrink, coinciding with warmer waters the fishermen observed, typically during December.

Likewise, trade winds are naturally occurring and move east to west. For centuries, sailors used them to speed their cargo ships across oceans. Historical evidence suggests El Niño winds spurred the Spanish conquest of South America, allowing ships to reach northwestern parts of the continent that winds in years past had kept them from reaching. Climatologists are not entirely sure why trade winds weaken — sometimes they weaken seemingly randomly.

But Wenju Cai, director of southern hemisphere oceans research at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, explained by email that “we know a bit.”

Cai pointed to the behavior of the Madden-Julien Oscillation, a moving mass of clouds, rain and wind over the Indian Ocean, discovered by climatologist Roland Madden and meteorologist Paul Julian in the 1970s, as one link to the intensity of trade winds over the Pacific.

El Niño patterns also mean shifting jet streams. Jet streams are currents of air that move roughly west to east and flow above trade winds. They are strongest around 6 to 8 miles above the earth’s surface, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Warmer Pacific waters cause the Pacific jet stream to dip south and extend across the southern U.S. and northern Mexico during strong El Niño years.

Jet streams form boundaries between warmer and cooler air, and high and low pressure. High pressure systems are more likely to bring fair weather and clearer skies, while low pressure systems are more likely to bring stormier weather.

During winter in the northern hemisphere, this dip in the jet stream typically results in warmer temperatures across much of Canada and the middle of the U.S., as well as more rain and flooding in southern California. Much of the Southeast, especially around the Florida panhandle, often gets cooler temperatures, as this area is just south of where the jet stream typically settles during El Niño.

This piece is a companion to our comprehensive explainer, “El Niño: What it is, how it devastates economies, and where it intersects with climate change.”

The post How El Niño and La Niña climate patterns form appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

There is a band of water across the equatorial Pacific Ocean, stretching from the coast of South America through to the island nations of Southeast Asia, whose temperature climatologists closely monitor as a driver of global weather patterns.

Typically, warm water that settles around Indonesia during early spring works as an atmospheric engine, an energy source that affects weather patterns around the world for the coming year.

But every two to seven years, this atmospheric engine shifts. When unusually warm water settles instead off the western coasts of Mexico and South America during the spring, the moisture and energy released into the atmosphere can profoundly change regional weather, from North America and South America to Asia and Africa.

This phenomenon is part of a broader climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The warm phase of ENSO is simply called El Niño. La Niña, its opposite, happens when those eastern Pacific waters are cooler than normal in the spring. A third, neutral phase, happens when Pacific waters are near average temperature.

As of mid-November, forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration give a more than 55% chance of a strong El Niño this winter. Odds are 35% for a historically strong El Niño, like those that happened from 2015 to 2016, and 1997 to 1998. Odds are 62% that El Niño will persist into spring 2024.

The stronger an El Niño, the higher the likelihood of flood, drought and other regional weather consequences. This topic is relevant to environmental journalists and business journalists alike — and we’ve created this explainer to help reporters explain the consequences of this periodic weather pattern to their audiences.

Here is what this El Niño explainer will cover:  

• How weather that deviates from regular expectations can have devastating economic consequences, particularly for people working in industries like fishing and agriculture who rely on some measure of climactic predictability.
• The findings of recent research that puts average global economic losses during El Niño years in the trillions of dollars.
• The effects of climate change on El Niño, which are poised to substantially increase that tally in the decades to come, research finds.

El Niño: ‘The most predictable climate driver’

El Niño and La Niña patterns last several months to a year, though sometimes longer. A strong El Niño is often followed the next year by a La Niña pattern.

“ENSO is the most predictable climate driver at seasonal timescales,” write the authors of a June 2021 paper in the journal Environmental Hazards.

But specific weather observed during past El Niño patterns may not appear in the same way during subsequent ones. While climatologists can predict an El Niño pattern with a high level of probability, precise regional effects are less predictable.

“Every El Niño is different,” says Christopher Callahan, a postdoctoral scholar of earth system science at Stanford University. “They all have slightly different patterns, or slightly different effects.”

In order to understand how El Niño stunts global economic growth and how it hampers local and regional economies, it will help to first understand predictions for regional weather based on historical analyses of this climate pattern, especially for journalists covering and communicating its effects over the coming months.

How El Niño can affect regional weather

Past El Niño events have meant warm, dry air for Southeast Asia and northern Australia during the northern hemisphere’s winter months. Rain and cooler air appear in the southern U.S. during the winter months there.

In South America, countries situated in the northwest and along the mid-Atlantic coast have seen wetter, warmer weather. The Gulf of Alaska and western Canada have experienced warmer temperatures during past El Niño events. El Niño patterns can even alter shorelines, finds research published June 2023 in Nature Communications.

NOAA forecasters predict, as of mid-October, higher than usual temperatures in the U.S. Northwest and Northeast during the winter. Across much of the U.S. South, they predict equal odds of higher or lower temperatures. There’s a slightly greater chance of rain across the middle of the country and along the eastern seaboard, with higher chances of precipitation in the Southeast, the forecasters predict.

Climatologists and meteorologists deal in probabilities, and predictions are not certainties. Ten days is about as far as meteorologists can reliably predict when it comes to specific weather patterns. Climatologists study weather events and atmospheric patterns over the long term — anything greater than about two weeks.

“You look at these seasonal outlooks and such that are influenced by El Niño, and it might shift the odds to a 60% chance of heavy rains as opposed to the average, which might be a 33% chance,” says Emily Becker, associate director of the University of Miami Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies. “That also still means there’s a 40% chance that you won’t have those heavy rains. That’s where El Niño’s information is provided — it’s in how the chances of certain events change. It never gives you a guarantee.”

How El Niño stunts global economic growth

Recent studies indicate El Niño patterns can significantly stunt economic growth. El Niño “drives considerable impacts that include El Niño-related droughts in western Pacific regions, floods in eastern Pacific regions and severe food shortage and cyclones to Pacific Island countries,” write the authors of a May 2023 paper published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

Globally, Callahan and Mankin attribute $5.7 trillion in unrealized economic gains, measured by GDP, over the five years following the 1997-to-1998 El Niño, along with $4.1 trillion associated with the 1982-to-1983 El Niño. For some countries, like Peru, El Niño hasn’t just meant unrealized gains — overall economic growth shrunk in the following years.

Callahan and Mankin note that the 1997-to-1998 El Niño was stronger than the 1982-to-1983 El Niño, and the world economy was larger in the late 1990s than in the early 1980s.

“El Niño events can produce extreme climate conditions that range from extreme rainfall to drought, to heat, to wildfire, to landslides to disease outbreaks,” Callahan says. “All of these things appear to sort of combine and integrate, to produce economic stress that lasts for five, or even up to 10 years, making these events far more costly than we realized.”

Wenju Cai, director of southern hemisphere oceans research at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, and coauthors find similar economic consequences in a September 2023 paper published in Nature Communications.

Using an analysis slightly different from Callahan and Mankin, they estimate the global economy would have been $2.1 trillion larger over the following three years if not for the 1997-to-1998 El Niño, and $3.9 trillion larger if not for the 2015-to-2016 El Niño.

La Niña can bring catastrophic rains to Southeast Asia and nearby regions, including some of the worst flooding in the history of Queensland, Australia during the 2010 La Niña. But fisheries off the Pacific coast of South America tend to do well, and some La Niña events have been shown to modestly boost global economic growth. Cai and coauthors associate the 1998-to-1999 strong La Niña with $60 billion in global economic gains.

Crucially, they also estimate that strong El Niño patterns linked to continued high emissions of greenhouse gasses could mean an additional $33 trillion in global economic losses through the end of the century.

“Greenhouse warming is likely to increase frequency and intensity of extreme El Niño events,” Cai explained by email. “An El Niño typically leads to a global economic loss in trillions of US dollars. Thus, an increase in El Niño frequency and amplitude will lead to more frequent extreme weather events that are more devastating in affected regions, and globally a greater loss in economic production, particularly in developing and emerging economies.”

Flood, drought and disease from El Niño patterns

While El Niño patterns tend to hamper the global economy, they can also be costly for local and regional economies. Take the southern U.S.: El Niño years often mean more rain than usual there, and flooding is the “most common and damaging natural disaster” in the U.S., write the authors of a July 2019 paper published in Weather, Climate and Society.

“The livelihood and socio-economic development of majority of the people in East African countries including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda largely depend on rain-fed agricultural activities,” write the authors. “The region is often affected by incidences of climate and weather extremes and is among the most flood-prone countries in Africa.”

For Zambia, a landlocked country in southern Africa, the strong 2015-to-2016 El Niño pattern brought severe drought, “which caused crops to fail shortly after planting and resulted in region-wide food deficit warnings,” write the authors of an April 2021 paper in Environment and Development Economics. 

The country particularly relies on maize for food and commerce. Since the 1990s, Zambian farmers have used sustainable land practices, such as crop rotation and soil and water conservation, according to the paper. Because El Niño patterns are generally predictable months in advance, farmers there were able to diversify production — but it wasn’t enough to make up the income from lost crops.

“We find that maize yields were substantially reduced and that household incomes were only partially protected from the shock thanks to diversification strategies,” the authors conclude. “Mechanical erosion control measures and livestock diversification emerge as the only strategies that provided yield and income benefits under weather shock.”

The results of a June 2020 paper in the journal Quaternary looks at drought data in Thailand over the past 2,000 years and finds mixed results as to whether El Niño patterns bring drought there. The authors conclude that “droughts are not a product of one climate pattern, but likely the result of numerous patterns interacting.”

Communities in the Costa Rican province of Guanacaste “suffer from recurrent droughts, often related to El Niño,” write the authors of a September 2021 paper published in Water Resources Research. El Niño-driven droughts are likely to severely reduce local water supplies, they find. The authors use hydrological modelling to estimate a 60% decline in streamflow and groundwater during an extreme El Niño pattern, with the nearby ocean temperature rising 2.5 degrees Celsius higher than usual.

La Niña, by contrast, brings intense storms to the province, which can help recharge groundwater aquifers, but are also “characterized by high sediment loads and often rush through the watersheds within hours,” the authors write.

“A key result is that with business-as-usual water use in combination with population growth and a change toward a drier climate … a decline in groundwater storage may be expected,” they conclude. “This would have substantial consequences for communities and agriculture that rely on groundwater especially during the long dry season.”

Flooding, extreme storms and fires related to El Niño patterns can make transportation difficult or impossible, with higher risks during El Niño years that roads, rail and other infrastructure could be wiped out in California, Hawaii and U.S. Pacific territories, finds research published December 2021 in Progress in Disaster Science.

Finally, El Niño patterns affect not just land and infrastructure, but have also been linked to disease outbreaks. Southeast Asia, Tanzania, the western U.S. and Brazil all saw disease outbreaks linked to the 2015-to-2016 El Niño, find the authors of a February 2019 paper in Scientific Reports. These outbreaks included plague in Colorado and New Mexico, cholera in Tanzania and dengue in Brazil.

“Extreme climate conditions, such as flooding associated with severe storms and natural disasters such as hurricanes, typhoons, or earthquakes, can disrupt water systems — exposing drinking water to waste water and other effluents — thus increasing the risk of cholera activity and other water-borne infections,” the authors write.

How climate change affects El Niño patterns

The science is settled that the world is warming at a historically fast rate due to humanity’s inventions, such as gasoline-powered vehicles and electric power.

“Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1 [degrees Celsius] above 1850 to 1900 levels in 2011 to 2020,” write the authors of a 2023 summary report for policymakers from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

While scientific consensus is not there when it comes to how climate change affects El Niño patterns, recent research explores specific links between global warming caused by humans, which is known as anthropogenic warming, and increasing variability in Pacific Ocean temperatures that fuel El Niño conditions.

The May 2023 paper in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment uses statistical modeling techniques to explore the effects of global warming on El Niño and La Niña patterns over the past 120 years — Cai is lead author.

This type of analysis is common in climate science research and is based on a complex series of computer models that simulate weather conditions. The authors acknowledge that when it comes to the intensity of El Niño and La Niña patterns, real-world data only goes back decades and is lower quality before the 1950s.

Still, they write that “determining the anthropogenic contributions to changing ENSO variability is vital to attribute causes of extreme events that are becoming more frequent and severe to understand ENSO projection and to gauge urgency of mitigation actions.” Cai also notes in an email to The Journalist’s Resource that the modeling approach used in the paper is the same as what the IPCC uses.

The authors find more than three-fourths of models show more frequent, stronger El Niño and La Niña patterns from 1961 to 2020 compared with 1901 to 1960. Taken together, the modelling results and other evidence in the paper “suggest that the increase in observed ENSO variability post-1960 is at least in part related to anthropogenic warming,” the authors write.

And it’s not just that models indicate El Niño patterns are likely becoming stronger. Global warming creates conditions that can exacerbate the effects of those patterns.

“For example, in areas where El Niño causes drought, higher air temperature due to greenhouse warming increases evaporation, so drought onset is earlier, drought is more severe, and drought is harder to get out,” Cai explained by e-mail. “In areas where El Niño causes flood, warmer air holds more water vapor, making the flood more extreme.”

The authors of another recent paper, published October 2023 in Geophysical Research Letters, examine the geologic record contained within stalagmites from southeastern Alaskan caves to analyze the core causes of El Niño patterns over millennia.

Climate in the Northeast Pacific is very influenced by water temperature in the equatorial Pacific — this is a teleconnection, a “pattern of influence,” as Callahan puts it, where a change in the atmosphere or water in one part of the world affects weather in another. The Aleutian Low, a low-pressure pattern that lingers over the Gulf of Alaska for much of the year, is stronger when the equatorial Pacific Ocean is warmer, bringing more rain than average to the southern Alaskan coast and northwestern Canada.

Stalagmites, which rise from a cave floor, and stalactites, which grow down from a cave roof, are part of the mineral deposit family known as speleothems. These deposits are “excellent at capturing atmospheric conditions over the past 3,500 years,” the authors write. Through the flow of water into and out of the cave and the natural dripping of water from cave roof to floor, the authors were able to look back in time at the existence of El Niño and La Niña patterns.

“It’s recording stable isotopes trapped in the rock, particularly Oxygen-18, which derives from precipitation,” says lead author Paul Wilcox, a postdoctoral researcher with the Innsbruck Quaternary Research Group in Austria. “Typically, we can only access that isotope by drilling small bits of powdered rock from the stalagmite, but this sample was unique in that it also contained trace amounts of water. It’s difficult to get that in a lot of records, and we were lucky enough to have samples that had enough water and grew fast enough to piece together a high-resolution record of ancient precipitation.”

Parts of the stalagmite sample with relatively high levels of Oxygen-18 indicate a weaker Aleutian Low — meaning that while that part of the stalagmite was forming, El Niño events were probably happening less frequently. Likewise, lower levels of the oxygen isotope indicate a stronger Aleutian Low, and the likely presence of more persistent El Niño patterns.

The other key part of this study has to do with solar irradiance, which is a measure of the naturally fluctuating energy from the sun that reaches the top of the earth’s atmosphere. Solar irradiance was the driving force behind El Niño and La Niña patterns for 2,000 years, until the 1970s, the authors find. They link La Niña patterns with more solar irradiance, and El Niño patterns with less solar irradiance.

Through satellite imagery and other measures, climatologists since the 1960s have known that the movement of air and water in different parts of the Pacific are not independent and random, but rather part of a larger system.

That system has changed, with connections between wind, water and atmosphere across the Pacific weakening since the 1970s. The authors point to data from the stalagmite as indicating that this change is linked to the remarkably high emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, stemming from human activity since the Industrial Revolution.

“There is a noticeable change in El Niño and La Niña variability that’s been known for several decades,” Wilcox says. “The problem is, there was too short of a record to really pinpoint if humans were causing this change or not. And this is where geologic records like the one we produced helps — kind of really more convincingly shows that this was likely human caused.”

Of the five strong El Niño events since 1901, three have happened since the 1970s, according to a September 2019 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Similar to a December 2019 paper in Geophysical Research Letters, the authors of the PNAS paper identify a westward shift since the 1970s in the “warm center” that catalyzes El Niño patterns, coinciding with “a rapid warming in the Indo-Pacific warm pool,” which they note may or may not be due entirely to human activity.

Still, if temperatures in the western Pacific continue to warm, and if greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at current rates, “more frequent extreme El Niño events will induce profound socioeconomic consequences,” the authors write.

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The world will see a 4.7-fold increase in heat-related deaths between today and 2050 if governments and companies don’t curb the use of fossil fuels and mitigate climate change, according to the annual report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, published on November 14.

Now in its eighth year, the report adds to a growing body of research documenting the impact of human-caused climate change on human health.

For the first time, the report provides projections on the growing risks to human health if global temperatures continue to rise and calls for a global commitment to transition to clean energy and energy efficiency.

“This report diagnoses a stark reality,” Dr. Renee Salas, one of the report’s authors and an emergency physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said during an online briefing for the report, held after its release on Nov. 15. “It makes clear that the further expansion of fossil fuels is reckless as it threatens the health and wellbeing of every person in the United States and around the world.”

The Countdown report is the result of a collaboration between 114 experts in 52 institutions and was funded by the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation in London. It includes a global report and policy briefs for several countries, including the U.S.

The report was released ahead of the 28th UN Conference of the Parties of UNFCCC, commonly called COP28, which for the first time is featuring health as a key theme. COP28 will be held in oil-rich Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12.

Climate reports like the Lancet Countdown are large documents, laden with data, and can be difficult to summarize in one news story. But local journalists can look for specific issues that apply to their communities and speak with local experts, policymakers and residents to produce stories that resonate with their audiences.

Below are six tips to cover major climate reports like the Lancet Countdown.

1. Explain how fossil fuels threaten human health.

Current climate change is mainly driven by human-generated greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil. When released into the atmosphere, the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO₂) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) intensify the greenhouse effect and increase the planet’s average temperature. Covering Climate Now offers several explainers and guidelines to help journalists understand and relay this information to their audiences.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, world leaders pledged to limit the globe’s temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100. But, given the lack of action by governments and companies, the world is on track to heat by 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, according to the Lancet Countdown report.

Today, the global temperature has increased by 1.14 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era, which spanned from 1850 to 1900. So far, 2023 has been the hottest year in more than 100,000 years, with heat records broken on every continent.

Climate change and rising temperatures increase the frequency of heat waves and droughts, jeopardizing access to food and water, and putting millions of people at risk of malnutrition and food insecurity. The report finds that frequent heat waves and droughts were responsible for 127 million more people experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity worldwide in 2021 than the annual average between 1981 and 2010.

In addition, air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels causes and worsens many health conditions, including heart and lung disease, neurologic and kidney conditions, mental health disorders, allergies, infectious diseases, pregnancy complications and poor birth outcomes, injuries and death, the Lancet Countdown report’s authors write.

“We have decades, decades of rigorous epidemiology and medical research showing the effects of air pollution on health,” Dr. Rebecca Philipsborn, an associate professor of pediatrics at Emory University, said during a Nov. 16 online briefing by the New England Journal of Medicine. “I think it’s settled science.”

Weather conditions, including extreme heat, can also reduce the safe hours to work or exercise outdoors.

Moreover, climate change can accelerate the spread of life-threatening infectious diseases, such as the West Nile virus, dengue, Zika, chikungunya, malaria, and Vibrio bacteria.

Vibrio bacteria live in certain coastal waters and thrive in warmer water temperatures. With increasing temperatures, they could put a record 1.4 billion people at risk of diarrheal disease, severe wound infections and sepsis, according to the report.

If the 1.5-degree Celsius target is missed and the world becomes hotter by 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, the length of the coastline suitable for Vibrio bacteria could expand by 17% to 25% and lead to 23% to 39% more cases globally. Also, the potential for dengue transmission could increase between 36% and 37%, the Lancet report finds.

2. Explain how climate change exacerbates inequities.

The Lancet Countdown report highlights how climate change exacerbates inequities around the world and in the U.S.

People who live in poor countries are often least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and yet bear the brunt of health impacts from climate change.

Wealthier countries have failed to reach the promised annual sum of $100 billion to support the countries that are most affected by climate change, according to the report. In 2009, during COP15, developed countries committed to mobilizing $100 billion a year for climate action in developing countries by 2020. In 2021, that sum was $90 billion, a 7.6% increase over the previous year, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Paris, France, with 38 member countries.

In the U.S., people with low income, people who live in historically redlined neighborhoods, and communities of color are more likely to live in areas where levels of air pollution are unhealthy, according to the U.S. brief portion of the Lancet Countdown report.

“Communities of color and low-income areas often face enormous and unjust burden of pollution because of fossil fuel industries,” Dr. Margot Brown, senior vice president of justice and equity at Environmental Defense Fund, said during the online Lancet briefing. “They are more likely to be located near them.”

While facing greater hazards from climate change, these communities have the fewest resources to recover from the harm, she said.

“Climate change is going to be a threat multiplier, meaning it will exacerbate the environmental injustice,” Brown said. “So, it is really imperative that we ensure that federal and state governments implement clean energy plant investments in an equitable and just way, opposing efforts that add to any additional pollution and overburden communities.”

3. Talk to emergency physicians, specialists, nurses and people at medical schools.

The medical community is increasingly aware of how climate change impacts patients, from older adults to outdoor workers to children and premature babies in neonatal intensive care units.

“We know that extreme heat and air pollution are associated with poor perinatal outcomes, including preterm birth and maternal hypertensive disorders,” said, Philipsborn of Emory University, who is a general pediatrician. “The subsequent burden of disease is immense.”

During the same briefing, Dr. Sumita Khatri, a pulmonologist, described how the burning of fossil fuels and climate change are the root of some of her patients’ breathing issues. For instance, one of her patients is a construction worker and his asthma has been worsened due to longer allergy seasons resulting from warmer temperatures, which in turn lead to higher pollen levels.

“People who work outdoors are at particular risk of heat-related respiratory symptoms and other heat-related illnesses,” Khatri said during the NEJM briefing. “The bottom line is this: Climate change is not a threat in some faraway land. It’s in our backyards.”

In 2022, heat exposure resulted in a loss of 490 billion potential labor hours globally, 42% more than the annual average from 1991 to 2000, according to the Lancet Countdown report. On average, each worker in the world lost 143 potential hours of work as a result of climate change.

There has also been a surge of interest in climate health education in medical schools during the past five years, Dr. Cecilia Sorensen, director of the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education and associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, said during the NEJM briefing.

“I’d say a large amount of this is being led by our medical students,” Sorensen said.

4. Ask local hospitals how they’re incorporating climate change into their plans.

Climate change increases pressure on health systems, which care for affected people.

Extreme weather events can disrupt health systems and hospitals, according to a 2022 report by The Commonwealth Fund. Health workers may also experience the physical and mental health effects of climate change more than the general population, because climate change not only disrupts their lives but also makes their jobs more challenging, and raises the risk of burnout, according to the report.

The Lancet Countdown includes policy briefs for several countries with data on the health impacts of climate change specific to each country.

The U.S. brief finds:

• Adults over age 65 experienced a 138% increase in total exposure to heatwaves each year from 2013 to 2022 compared with 1986 to 2005, meaning each older adult, on average, was exposed to an additional 2.8 heatwave days per year as compared to the historical baseline.
• Infants under 1 year were exposed to 61% more heatwaves, meaning that each infant, on average, was exposed to an additional 3.2 heatwave days per year from 2013 to 2022 compared with 1986 to 2005.
• The transmission season for Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax — two parasites that cause malaria — lengthened by 39% and 34%, respectively, in U.S. lowland areas from 2013 to 2022 compared with 1951 to 1960.
• The ability of Aedes aegypti — the mosquito that can carry the dengue virus — to transmit dengue had more than doubled from 2013 to 2022 compared with 1951 to 1960.

5. Highlight hopes and potential solutions.

Even though the Lancet Countdown report bears grim news, it provides morsels of hope.

Deaths from fossil fuel-derived air pollution have fallen by almost 16% since 2005. At the same time, global investment in clean energy grew 15% in 2022 to $1.6 trillion.

The report also outlines health benefits that could result from a transition to a zero-carbon future. Improved air quality could prevent many of the 1.9 million deaths each year that result from exposure to air pollution. Transition to low-carbon diets could prevent up to 12 million deaths annually from poor diets and reduce 57% of agricultural emissions from dairy and red meat production.

Covering this aspect of the Lancet report provides an opportunity to highlight climate solutions in your community. The Washington Post, for instance, has a dedicated section on climate solutions. NPR dedicated a week to covering climate solutions. And Covering Climate Now has a Climate Solutions Reporting Guide.

6. If national and local officials have introduced plans and legislation to combat climate change, ask advocates and residents if they’re seeing the impact.

During the Lancet Countdown online briefing, Admiral Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, listed the Biden Administration’s efforts to address climate change:

• In August 2021, the Biden Administration established the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity to address the impact of climate change on the health of Americans.
• In December 2021, President Biden issued an executive order setting requirements for federal agencies to reduce their carbon footprint and achieve net-zero emissions from buildings and campuses by 2045.
• In spring 2022, the administration launched the White House-HHS Health Sector Climate Pledge, a voluntary commitment by the health sector to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. So far, 116 organizations have signed on.
• Also, the Inflation Reduction Act has several opportunities for the health sector, including tax credits, grants and technical assistance programs, “making billions available for transformative clean energy building efficiency and infrastructure resilience projects that could really remake the face of the section,” Levine said.

During the Lancet online briefing, one of the featured speakers, Roishetta Sibley Ozane, founder, director and CEO of Vessel Project of Louisiana, an environmental justice organization, urged policymakers to have conversations with communities that are bearing the brunt of air pollution and climate change.

“When you talk about what the Biden administration has done, it sounds good on paper. It looks good on paper,” said Ozane, who lives in Southwest Louisiana. “My community smells like rotten eggs, mixed with Clorox. You’re gonna get a headache, you’re gonna feel sick. You’re not gonna want to stay here, but this is where we live every day. We don’t need any false solutions. We need real conversations with real impacted people.”

Additional reading

The fifth National Climate Assessment
U.S. Global Change Research Program, November 2023.

Sacrifice Zones: Mapping Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution
ProPublica, November 2021.

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American voters who have low or moderate levels of trust in university researchers are less likely to believe that climate change is an important problem and that it’s driven by human activities, according to a study published this month in PLOS Climate.

The study, which finds trust in university research centers was higher among voters under 30, non-Protestants, regular religious service attendees, Democrats, and ideologically moderate or liberal individuals, adds to an existing body of research examining the role of public trust in science, including climate change.

The study is based on a nationally representative survey of 2,096 registered U.S. voters who were asked questions about their belief in climate change, trust in university research centers, religion, ideology, political identity, race and gender. The online survey was conducted in May 2022.

The scientific community overwhelmingly agrees that climate change is real and the Earth’s climate is affected by human activities. Despite this scientific consensus, a portion of Americans don’t believe it.

Over the years, polls have shown a political and ideological divide in the U.S. in beliefs about climate change and its causes, and that divide may be widening.

An August 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center found 78% of Democrats describe climate change as a major threat, up from 58% a decade ago. Meanwhile, 23% of Republicans find climate change a major threat, almost identical to 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, Americans’ trust in scientists has been declining since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, according a February 2022 report by Pew.

Overall, 29% of Americans expressed a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public, down from 40% in November 2020, according to the report.

Some responsibility for the trust decline lies with the scientists, according to Ramit Debnath, one of the authors of the PLOS Climate study, “Why Don’t Americans Trust University Researchers and Why it Matters for Climate Change.”

“A broken science communication paradigm restricts the flow of evidence-driven facts in [the] public domain,” Debnath wrote in an email.

The solution is for “universities and scientists to work to re-establish public trust and confidence in our research,” Debnath, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, and his co-authors R. Michael Alvarez, a professor of political and computational social science at the California Institute of Technology, and Daniel Ebanks, a Ph.D. candidate at Caltech, write in the paper.

The authors’ sentiment has been expressed by other researchers, including Dr. Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at University of Rochester and self-described “evangelist of science.”

Skeptics “need to understand how science works,” Frank said in a July 2022 story by the University of Rochester’s News Center. “We don’t gain their trust just by telling them about results. They need to understand how scientists know what they know.”

Debnath and colleagues add that trusted messengers, such as religious organizations and leaders, might play a pivotal role in helping garner this trust.

The consequences of distrust in university research

The study also highlights the ramifications of distrust in science.

“This lack of trust in climate science has critical environmental, social and political consequences,” write Debnath and colleagues in the study. “It weakens the science-society compact and enables the active resistance of powerful actors with vested interests to change the status quo from which they disproportionately profit.”

Also, “if the United States continues down this road of science denial, the best and brightest of the world won’t come here. It’s really about our nation’s capacity to be an economic powerhouse,” Frank says.

The role of the news media

Among the study’s other findings is an association between where people get their news and trust in researchers.

Those who follow the news on television and print were more likely to trust university research and believe that climate change is an important issue. Respondents whose primary news sources were online were least trusting of university research.

The study notes climate change denial in the U.S. has not only been fueled by a complex interplay of ideological forces and politics, but also by distorted media representations, including the practice of false balance, giving equal play to scientists and climate deniers. This has further muddied the waters, the authors write in the paper, presenting scientific consensus as just another opinion.

In his email, Debnath wrote that journalists play a central role in making science accessible to the public and in training university researchers in science communication.

“This is a life skill that scientists are often left to learn on their own or not care/not made aware about at all,” he wrote. “Journalists have a much greater role to play in both reinforcement and long-term strategy planning to prevent misinformation and polarization.”

The study’s findings

Responses to the question of climate change importance were simplified into two categories: important and not important. (You can read more about how climate change is the result of human activities on NASA’s website.)

Below are the study’s findings in more detail, grouped by the main survey question.

“On a scale from 0 to 10, how much do you trust university research centers, where 0 means you don’t trust the institution at all and 10 means you trust it completely.”

• Individuals aged 45-64 and those over 65 were less inclined to trust university research centers compared with those under 30.
• Respondents with postgraduate education showed a higher level of trust in university research centers compared with those with no post-high school education.
• Protestant registered voters displayed a lower trust in university research centers compared with individuals from other religious denominations (Catholic, Jewish and other) and those without any religious affiliation.
• Regular attendees of religious services exhibited higher trust in university research centers compared with those who never attend.
• Democrats and moderates showed a higher level of trust in university research centers than independents. The results for Republicans and conservatives were not statistically significant.
• Traditional information sources like print and television positively influenced trust in university research centers. Conversely, trust was lower among those who relied on online news sources, but this finding wasn’t statistically significant. The results for radio listeners were also not statistically significant.

“How much of a problem do you believe climate change may be in the next 10 years for the United States?”

• Trust in science played a pivotal role. Those with low trust in science were significantly less likely to see climate change as important compared with those with high trust. Even those with moderate trust in science were less likely to consider it an important issue, relative to high trust individuals.
• Respondents aged 45-64 and 65 and older were less likely to consider climate change an important problem compared with those under 30. The results for the 31-44 age group were not significant.
• Democrats and those identifying as moderates or liberals were more likely to view climate change as an important issue compared to Republicans and conservatives.
• Other demographics, like race/ethnicity, education, region, and religious affiliation, didn’t show statistically significant differences.
• People who followed news on television or print were more likely to believe climate change is a crucial issue. No significant findings were seen for radio or online news consumers.

“Do you think that climate change is caused by human activities or that it is a natural event?”

• Those with low trust in science were much less likely to attribute climate change to human activities compared with those with high trust. Even respondents with moderate trust were less likely to believe humans cause climate change when compared with those with high trust.
• 59% of respondents believed climate change is due to human activities, while 41% attributed it to natural events.
• Black respondents were more inclined to believe that climate change results from natural events compared with white respondents. Conversely, Hispanics/Latinos had a higher likelihood than other ethnicities and races to attribute climate change to human activities.
• Respondents over 45 were less likely to believe that climate change is caused by human actions.
• Jewish and non-Catholic respondents more often believed in human-caused climate change than other religious groups. Respondents with no religious affiliations were significantly more likely to attribute climate change to humans than nature.
• Democrats, moderates, and liberals were statistically more likely to attribute climate change to human activities than nature.

Next steps for scientists

The authors offer four recommendations for the scientific community to address this trust deficit:

1. Targeted research: More research is needed to understand who currently trusts university research on climate change and sustainability, who does not and who is on the fence, and how to develop tailored strategies for each group.
2. Message framing: The way scientific findings are presented can make a big difference. “These results suggest scientists cannot necessarily expect that these groups will automatically trust their work, even if their research is of high quality and well-evidenced. Instead, scientists need to be more sensitive to understanding how to translate and discuss their work in ways that are understandable, and which generate trust among the public,” the authors write.
3. Finding the right messengers: It’s not always the scientists themselves who make the best communicators. “While additional research is necessary, our survey results indicate that religious organizations and leaders might provide an important mechanism for the generation of higher levels of trust in university research,” they write.
4. Education: The long-term strategy should focus on primary and secondary education. “What is also needed is developing educational approaches and materials that help students better understand the scientific process and how they can best understand and interpret scientific materials. Only by educating the next generations can we minimize distrust of scientific research in the longer term,” the authors write.

Like all studies, this paper has limitations. The study is observational and it depends on survey designs, so it can only paint a partial picture of the issue. The authors note their future research aims to refine survey methods, introduce more nuanced questions, and delve deeper into causal relationships concerning trust in science and climate action.

The study was funded by the Quadrature Climate Foundation, Keynes Fund and Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. The funders had no role in the study. The authors declared no competing interests.

Sources

• What the data says about Americans’ views of climate change
  Alec Tyson, Cary Funk and Brian Kennedy. Pew Research Center, August 2023.
• Can the public’s trust in science—and scientists—be restored?
  University of Rochester News Center, July 2022.
• Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Other Groups Declines
  Brian Kennedy, Alec Tyson and Cary Funk. Pew Research Center, February 2022.
• The Role of Trust for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Behaviour: A Meta-Analysis
  Viktoria Cologna and Michael Siegrist. Journal of Environmental Psychology, June 2020.
• Questioning Scientific Practice: Linking Beliefs About Scientists, Science Agencies, and Climate Change
  Thomas G. Safford, Emily H. Whitmore and Lawrence C. Hamilton. Environmental Sociology, December 2019.
• The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
  Naomi Oreskes. Science, December 2004.
• Trust
  Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser. Our World in Data.

Additional reading

• “How Trustworthy Is This Research?” Designing a Tool to Help Readers Understand Evidence and Uncertainty in Science Journalism
  Anders Sundnes Løvlie, Astrid Waagstein and Peter Hyldgård. Digital Journalism, April 2023.
• Public Trust and Mistrust of Climate Science: A Meta-Narrative Review
  Antoinette Fage-Butler, Loni Ledderer and Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen. Public Understanding of Science, August 2022.
• Meta-Analyses of Fifteen Determinants of Public Opinion About Climate Change Taxes and Laws
  Magnus Bergquist,  Andreas Nilsson,  Niklas Harring and  Sverker C. Jagers. Nature Climate Change, March 2022.
• Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010
  Gordon Gauchat. American Sociological Review, March 2012.

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In both cities and suburbs, affluent neighborhoods are more likely to enjoy the cool shade of trees than lower-income neighborhoods, some of which bear the scars of historic redlining and housing segregation.

The absence of trees is not just an aesthetic discrepancy — it can impact human health and well-being, a growing body of research shows. Neighborhoods devoid of trees often grapple with the urban heat island effect, where concrete and asphalt absorb and magnify summer’s heat and elevate the risk of heat-related illnesses. Heat islands are often linked to factors such as income and race.

Some studies have linked long-term exposure to green surroundings to health benefits such as living longer. In contrast, unsheltered sidewalks can deter residents from walking, exercising or socializing outdoors.

More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. In the U.S. and Canada, nearly 80% of people live in urban areas, according to estimates from academic research. Meanwhile, in the U.S., urban tree canopy cover is declining at an estimated rate of four million trees per year due to urbanization and tree diseases.

In addition, climate change is making summer days hotter and heat waves more frequent and longer. Researchers warn this can further exacerbate the divide, calling on policymakers to invest in planting more trees and creating more green spaces in barren neighborhoods. Some cities are beginning to address these inequities by investing in new green spaces or testing creative solutions, such as green roofs.

American Forests, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., has created Tree Equity Scores for nearly 200,000 urban neighborhoods in the U.S. to measures how well the benefits of urban tree canopy are reaching those who need them most, including low incomes, communities of color and those disproportionately affected by extreme heat, pollution and other environmental hazards.

Journalists can assess tree equity in their coverage area and find out whether local officials are implementing plans to reduce inequities in green space. To bolster journalists’ knowledge and reporting, we’ve gathered and summarized several recent studies that assess tree and green space inequities in cities and neighborhoods and examine their association with health. The studies are organized by publication date.

Research roundup

The Tree Cover and Temperature Disparity in US Urbanized Areas: Quantifying the Association with Income Across 5,723 Communities
Robert I. McDonald, et al. PLoS ONE, April 2021.

The study: Researchers use digital images from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agriculture Imagery Program to survey tree cover inequity in 100 large urban areas in the U.S., including 5,723 municipalities and home to 167 million people. They compare tree cover with summer land-surface temperature, using NASA’s Landsat imagery. The study focuses on one benefit of tree canopies: reducing temperature. Tree canopies primarily cool the air by shading surfaces such as concrete and asphalt, preventing heat storage and reducing the urban heat island effect. Tree cover can reduce land surface temperature by 10 to 20 degrees Celsius (18 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit) on a summer day, the authors write.

The findings: In 92% of the areas studied, low-income blocks had less tree cover than high-income blocks. More specifically, low-income blocks on average had 15.2% less tree cover and were 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F) hotter than high-income blocks. In the Northeast U.S, low-income blocks had 30% less tree cover and were 4 C hotter (7.2 F) than high-income areas, showing some of the greatest differences in the U.S. At 54%, Connecticut had the greatest difference between high- and low-income neighborhoods. Researchers also find a positive association between more tree cover and populations that are white and have higher income. But, in 22% of the urban areas there was not a statistically significant relationship between income and tree cover.

Quote from the study: “A targeted investment in tree planting of $15.8 billion would close the urban tree cover disparity for 34 million people in low-income blocks of moderate or greater population density, although it would likely take at least 5–10 years for planted trees to be large enough to deliver significant ecosystem service benefits. Some of the needed tree planting would occur through public sector investment in tree planting and maintenance on the public right of way and publicly owned land… But some of the needed tree planting would have to occur on private land, which would require incentives or regulations that motivate the private sector to conduct this tree planting.”

More, from the lead author: “Tree inequality is worse in the suburbs,” published in thenatureofcities.com in May 2021.

Residential Housing Segregation and Urban Tree Canopy in 37 US Cities
Dexter H. Locke, et al. Urban Sustainability, March 2021.

The study: Researchers assess how the practice of redlining, a racially discriminatory housing policy established by the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation during the 1930s, may relate to tree canopy coverage in city neighborhoods in 2020. “Tree canopy” typically refers to areas that are shaded by trees. The authors include 37 metropolitan areas, comparing predominantly white neighborhoods during the redlining era with areas where mostly racial and ethnic minorities lived.

The findings: Redlining influenced the location and allocation of trees and parks. The 37 metropolitan areas where mostly racial and ethnic minorities lived during the 1930s have, on average, 23% tree canopy cover today. Areas where U.S.-born white people lived in the 1930s have almost twice as much tree canopy, 43%.

Quote from the study: “Our investigation into 37 cities reveals a strong association between HOLC grades inscribed on maps roughly nine decades ago and present-day tree canopy. The study design cannot identify causal pathways, but the inequity invites careful scrutiny of the social, economic, and ecological processes that have created the demonstrably uneven and inequitable distribution of urban tree canopy in the United States.”

Green Spaces and Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Cohort Studies
David Rojas-Rueda, et al. The Lancet Planetary Health, November 2019.

The study: Researchers looked for English-language longitudinal studies that assessed the association between green spaces, or lack a thereof, and the risk of death from any cause. The meta-analysis of nine studies, published between 2012 and 2019, included more than 8 million adults from Australia, Canada, China, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the U.S.

The findings: Increasing green spaces in neighborhoods is significantly associated with reducing risk of death. While researchers haven’t yet identified a causal relationship between green spaces and health, they have offered several theories. For instance, green spaces can foster physical activity, walking and cycling. They also lessen air pollution, noise and the heat island effect.

Quote from the study: “Although the benefits of green spaces and mortality that we found are robust, negative effects of increasing green spaces in the urban environment (such as gentrification) can occur, and these externalities should be considered when urban public policies are designed.”

Who Has Access to Urban Vegetation? A Spatial Analysis of Distributional Green Equity in 10 US Cities
Lorien Nesbitt, et al. Landscape and Urban Planning, January 2019.

The study: The study is an analysis of the relationship between urban vegetation and socioeconomic and demographic factors in 10 urban areas in the U.S.: Chicago, Houston, Indianapolis, Seattle, St. Louis, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Ore. and Jacksonville, Fla. Researchers used high-resolution aerial imagery and Census data for their analysis. They define equitable access to urban vegetation as fair access, regardless of income, race or age.

The findings: Access to green spaces in urban areas is generally associated with higher income, higher education and higher percentage of white residents. Latino urban residents had the lowest level of access to urban greenery, followed by African American and Indigenous residents. Meanwhile, socioeconomic factors appear to be less often associated with access to park area, suggesting that parks are more equitably distributed.

Quote from the study: “The impact of urban vegetation exposure on the health and well-being of marginalized communities may become even more critical as climate change worsens. When health inequalities intersect with low access to urban vegetation, this intersection can create areas of high climate vulnerability.”

More on urban vegetation: The authors parse the effects of different types of green spaces. An area with a mix of vegetation, including shrubs, hedges, garden and crop plants and grassy areas, reduce stormwater runoff and offer green views that can reduce stress. Trees, or woody vegetation, can reduce the urban heat island effect by providing shade. Trees can also improve air quality, while parks offer space for physical activity and socialization.

More, from the lead author: “How cities can avoid ‘green gentrification’ and make urban forests accessible,” published in The Conversation in June 2021.

Additional reading

• Inequalities in Urban Greenness and Epigenetic Aging: Different Associations by Race and Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status
  Kyeezu Kim, et al. Science Advances, June 2023.
• Breathing Fresh Air in the City: Implementing Avenue Trees as a Sustainable Solution to Reduce Particulate Pollution in Urban Agglomerations
  Mamun Mandal, et al. Plants (Basel), April 2023.
• Leafier Communities, Healthier Hearts: An Australian Cohort Study of 104,725 Adults Tracking Cardiovascular Events and Mortality Across 10 Years of Linked Health Data
  Xiaoqi Feng, Michael A. Navakatikyan, Renin Toms and Thomas Astell-Burt. Heart, Lung and Circulation, January 2023.
• Exposure to Urban Greenspace and Pathways to Respiratory Health: An Exploratory Systematic Review
  William Mueller, et al. Science of the Total Environment, July 2022.
• The Disparity in Tree Cover and Ecosystem Service Values Among Redlining Classes in the United States
  David J. Nowak, Alexis Ellis and Eric J. Greenfield. Landscape and Urban Planning, May 2022.
• Urban Trees and Human Health: A Scoping Review
  Kathleen L. Wolf, et al. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, June 2020.
• The Value of US Urban Tree Cover for Reducing Heat-Related Health Impacts and Electricity Consumption
  Robert I. McDonald, Timm Kroeger, Ping Zhang and Perrine Hamel. Ecosystems, May 2019.
• Redlining and Neighborhood Walking in Older Adults: The 2017 National Household Travel Survey
  Lilah M. Besser, Diana Mitsova, Christine L. Williams and Lisa Wiese. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, December 2022.
• The Relationship Between Urban Forests and Race: A Meta-Analysis
  Shannon Lea Watkins and Ed Gerrish. Journal of Environmental Management, March 2018.
• The Relationship Between Urban Forests and Income: A Meta-Analysis
  Ed Gerrish and Shannon Lea Watkins. Landscape and Urban Planning, February 2018.
• Exploring Pathways Linking Greenspace to Health: Theoretical and Methodological Guidance
  Iana Markevych, et al. Environmental Research, October 2017.
• Exposure to Greenness and Mortality in a Nationwide Prospective Cohort Study of Women
  Peter James, Jaime E. Hart, Rachel F. Banay and Francine Laden. Environmental Health Perspective, September 2016.
• Trees Grow on Money: Urban Tree Canopy Cover and Environmental Justice
  Kirsten Schwarz, et al. PLoS ONE, April 2015.
• Urban Greening to Cool Towns and Cities: A Systematic Review of the Empirical Evidence
  Diana E. Bowler, et al. Landscape and Urban Planning, September 2010.

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July was the Earth’s hottest month on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a program of the European Union.

Extreme heat not only strains water, energy and transportation infrastructure, and affects crops and livestock, it also impacts human health. Many people don’t take heat warnings seriously, as highlighted in the findings of a 2007 telephone survey of 908 people in North America, published in the International Journal of Biometeorology. But studies show extreme heat can affect most people, particularly vulnerable populations like children, older adults and outdoors workers.

“It’s pretty clear that human-caused climate change is causing average temperatures to increase and it’s pretty clear that heat waves globally — but specifically in some regions of the world — are becoming longer, more frequent and more severe,” says Dr. Catharina Giudice, a practicing emergency physician and Climate and Human Health Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment. “And we’re certainly seeing the repercussions of that on the health of communities that, unfortunately, are not used to the heat, or not set up to deal with the heat.”

In the U.S., during the first seven months of 2023, there were 15 separate weather and climate disasters in which overall costs and damages reached or exceeded $1 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the devastating August wildfire in Maui, Hawaii, which has been declared the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century, has a current estimated cost of nearly $10 billion.

Heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S., outranking hurricanes, tornadoes and floods, according to the latest data available from the National Weather Service. Between 2004 and 2018, an average of 702 heat-related deaths occurred in the U.S. each year, according to a 2020 study in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. About 70% of those deaths were between May and September.

“With continued warming, cold-related deaths are projected to decrease and heat-related deaths are projected to increase; in most regions, increases in heat-related deaths are expected to outpace reductions in cold-related deaths,” according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Fourth National Climate Assessment, a detailed analysis of how climate change is affecting the United States and its people.

In July, President Biden asked the Department of Labor to issue the first-ever Hazard Alert for heat to protect workers, including farmworkers, farmers, firefighters and construction workers from the dangers of extreme heat. Since 2011, more than 400 workers have died due to heat exposure, according to the White House.

Who’s at risk?

Extreme heat can affect anyone, but certain populations are at a higher risk. They include children, older adults, outdoor workers, pregnant people, people with chronic diseases, people with disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, and incarcerated people. People of color, especially American Indian and Alaska Natives, and Black people have higher rates of heat-related deaths, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In addition, “communities that didn’t experience heat waves are now experiencing heat waves and extreme heat and some don’t have the societal infrastructure,” Giudice says. “There are apartments that don’t have air conditioning, because in the past that hasn’t been necessary. So when heat hits the community by surprise, it can be extremely dangerous because the infrastructure is not there.”

Also, certain medications put people at a higher risk. One example is diuretics, which stimulate the kidneys to remove water, and are commonly used to treat high blood pressure or for people who have too much fluid collecting in their bodies.

“So those people are more prone to dehydration and more prone to the effects of extreme heat,” Giudice says.

People who have substance use disorders are also at higher risk, since anything that alters consciousness is going to decrease the ability to respond to changing temperature, she says. “If you’re too intoxicated and you don’t realize that you’re in an extremely hot environment, obviously that’s going to affect your ability to remove yourself and seek shade and shelter.”

What are the solutions?

“I think the conversation several years ago was let’s prevent climate change from happening,” Giudice says. “And unfortunately, we are at a place where we’re already seeing climate change happening. So, we need to prevent future worsening and we need to cut our carbon emissions or usage of fossil fuels as fast as possible.”

The more immediate solutions are adapting to the changing climate at the individual, community and national levels, she says.

“At the individual level, it’s important for people to have a plan. If you don’t have air conditioning, where are going to go? Where’s the heat shelter? Some communities have specific cooling shelters,” Giudice says.

Also, “cities need to think about how to make sure that their electrical grids are able to withstand the surges in electrical usage during heat waves,” she adds.

Lastly, “it’s very important for people to have a community sense during heat waves and check on their neighbors, families and friends, especially if they have a loved one who is elderly and lives by themselves,” Giudice says.

Research roundup

To help journalists better explain the serious impact of extreme heat on physical and mental health, we’ve selected seven recent studies that explore the impact of extreme heat on human health. They address topics including heat strokes, heat waves, impacts on people with diabetes, outdoor workers, people who experience homelessness and the use of ambulance services. We’ve selected each study as a prompt for a news story or additional context for heat-related stories. They’re organized by publication date.

High Ambient Temperatures Associations with Children and Young Adult Injury Emergency Department Visits in NYC
Blean Girma, et al. Environmental Research, Health, September 2023.

The study:Researchers collected data on all daily emergency room visits in New York City from 2005 to 2011 from the New York Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System, an administrative database of inpatient and emergency room visits in New York. They focused on emergency room visits in hotter months of May through September, and children and young adults from newborn to 25 years old. Heat-related injuries among kids include dehydration, heat-related illness, diarrhea and digestion disorders and infectious diseases. “When it is hot outside, exposed individuals may have impaired response abilities, which may in turn, result in unintentional injury,” the authors explain.

The findings: There was a 30% higher odds of emergency room visit for an injury during the warmest temperatures compared with coolest temperatures during the warm season. Young males between ages 5 and 9 were most likely to go emergency room with injuries during warmer weather, mostly due to increased activity or lack of adult supervision.

Quote from the study: “Our results underscore the importance of considering variation in the health effects of heat, and consequences for healthcare utilization, given the growing impact of climate change. This research raises awareness of the multifaceted ways by which climate change and the urban climate impact children’s health and well-being.”

Also from the study: “We suggest that local, city, and state government consider the vulnerability of children and young adults in their extreme heat mitigation strategies, which could also include highlighting activities, resources and tools community members can use to alleviate social and mental health stressors during warmer periods.”

Heat, Heatwaves, and Ambulance Service Use: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Epidemiological Evidence
Zhiwei Xu, et al. International Journal of Biometeorology, July 2023.

The study: In this systematic review and meta-analysis, researchers include 48 English-language papers published between 2011 and 2022 about the association between heat or heat waves and the risk of ambulance dispatches.

The findings: There’s an association between ambulance dispatches and heat or heat waves. Each 5 degrees Centigrade increase in average temperature was associated with 7% increased risk of ambulance dispatches for any cause and 2% increased risk of ambulance dispatches for heart disease.

More about ambulance activity: Ambulance data has been used as the bellwether of health service use, including hospitals and emergency rooms, during hot days. You can use this heat.gov tool to find emergency medical services responses to heat-related illnesses in each county across the country.

Classic Heat Stroke in a Desert Climate: A Systematic Review of 2632 Cases
Saber Yezli, et al. Journal of Internal Medicine, March 2023.

The study: Researchers included 47 English language studies, including 2,632 patients, carried out between 1962 and 2019 and before April 2022 on heatstroke cases during the Muslim pilgrimage (Hajj) in the desert climate of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. About two million people perform the Hajj each year. The authors note that their systematic review includes one of the largest cohorts of heatstrokes reported to date, allowing them the review the natural course of heatstrokes from the earliest signs.

The findings: The early signs and symptoms of heatstroke can affect the nervous, digestive and cardiovascular systems, suggesting that it is a systemic illness. Heatstrokes induce widespread early tissue injury and multiple organ dysfunction and failure. Also, nearly 40% of people who had a heatstroke were overweight or obese, suggesting that this population is particularly vulnerable. Overweight and obese adults also have 3.5 times risk of death from heatstroke. People with high blood pressure and diabetes were also at a higher risk of heatstroke, which, the authors note, agree with previous reports that show an increase risk of heatstroke in people with most chronic conditions and medications used to manage them.

Quote from the study: “The findings of this review indicate that [heatstroke] is a severe medical condition with widespread early multi-organ injury. They suggest that early diagnosis and therapy reduce the progression to more organ damage resulting in lower mortality compared to previous studies in other settings. Importantly, they indicate that in the best possible setting, including early diagnosis and therapy, cooling and supportive therapy are not sufficient, and thus, novel interventions are urgently needed to further reduce morbidity and mortality.”

More about heatstrokes: Heatstroke, also written heat stroke, is the most serious heat-related illness, according to the CDC. It happens when the body can no longer control its temperature and can rise to 106 degrees Fahrenheit or higher within 10 to 15 minutes. Heatstroke can cause permanent disability or death if the person isn’t treated quickly. Early signs include confusion, slurred speech and profuse sweating.

The Impact of Heat Waves on the Mortality of Chinese Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Ranran Pan, et al. Medicine (Baltimore), March 2023.

The study: In this systematic review and meta-analysis, researchers analyzed the findings of 15 studies published before November 2022 on the impact of heat waves on the death of people in China. The authors note heat waves may pose a greater threat to China due to an aging population, which is more vulnerable to extreme heat.

The findings: Heat waves were associated with an increased risk of death in the Chinese population. There was a 19% increase in risk of death due to heat waves in China, which is higher than developed nations such as United States (11%) and Sweden (10%). However, the risk of heatwave-related deaths is lower in China than in developing countries such as India (43.1%) and Pakistan (166.8%). Also, the risk of death was higher among people who had less than six years of education compared with those who had more education, potentially due to more outdoor work and lack of health literacy.

Quote from the study: “In summary, the present meta-analysis provides strong evidence that heat waves are significantly associated with an increased risk of death in the Chinese population, especially among residents with low education levels. Therefore, high-risk populations should be the focus of public health policies, and prevention strategies should be developed and implemented to effectively reduce the public health harm caused by extreme temperature events.”

More about heat waves: There’s no set definition for heat wave. The National Weather Service defines it as “a period of abnormally hot weather generally lasting more than two days.” Heat waves can last weeks. In 2003, an estimated 70,000 people died in Europe due to a heat wave that spanned from June to August. And in 2010 in the Russian Federation, 56,000 more people died during a 44-day heat wave. From 1998 to 2017, more than 166,000 people died due to heat waves, including more than 70,000 who died during the 2003 heatwave in Europe, according to WHO.

Association Between Extreme Ambient Heat Exposure and Diabetes-Related Hospital Admissions and Emergency Department Visits: A Systematic Review
Donghong Gao, et al. Hygiene and Environmental Health Advances, December 2022.

The study: Researchers summarize the findings of 18 English-language papers, published between 2010 and 2022, which explored the link between extreme heat and diabetes emergency room visits or hospital admissions.

The findings: There’s a significant association between exposure to extreme heat and diabetes-related hospital admission or emergency room visits. Extreme heat was associated with 4.5% increased risk of hospital admission or emergency room visit among people with diabetes and 10% increased risk among older adults with diabetes.

Quote from the study: “The findings from this review will be useful for developing evidence-based interventions to reduce the impact of extreme heat exposure on diabetes, identifying the target population for the interventions (i.e., older adults), and supporting public health initiatives for public education to increase public awareness of the risk of extreme ambient heat exposure on diabetes.”

More about diabetes and extreme heat: Diabetes affects more than 10% of the U.S. population, and people with diabetes are among populations that are more vulnerable to extreme heat. Certain complications from diabetes — both type 1 and type 2 — such as damage to blood vessels and nerves, can affect sweat glands and the body can’t cool effectively, increasing the risk of heat exhaustion and heatstroke, according to the CDC. Also, people with diabetes get dehydrated more quickly.

Heat Waves and Emergency Department Visits Among the Homeless, San Diego, 2012–2019
Lara Schwarz, et al. American Journal of Public Health, December 2021.

The study: Researchers obtained emergency department use data from two hospitals in San Diego between 2012 and 2019, analyzing data for 24,688 visits between May to September by patients who were identified as homeless.

The findings: In total, 94% of the patients were younger than 65; 14% said they needed a psychiatric consultation. The strongest risk of emergency room visits was during daytime heatwaves.

Quote from the study: “Homelessness is rapidly becoming a major social challenge in the United States. Structural inequalities, housing crises, high rental costs, and natural disasters have all contributed to the increasing number of persons experiencing homelessness in recent years. … As the threat of increasingly frequent and more intense heat waves continues to rise in the United States, particularly in California, understanding and prioritizing the needs of this rapidly growing vulnerable population will be a critical action in developing and deploying effective mitigation strategies.”

Extreme Heat and Occupational Injuries in Different Climate Zones: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Epidemiological Evidence
Syeda Hira Fatima, et al. Environment International, March 2021.

The study: Researchers included 24 English and non-English language studies, published between January 2005 and July 2020, which assessed the effects of extreme heat on work-related injuries among non-military workers. The systematic review represents work-related injuries in six countries — Australia, Canada, China, Italy, Spain and U.S. — and across nine climate zones. Work-related injuries during hot weather include heat stress, inability to work, heat-related illness, loss of productivity and even death.

The findings: All studies suggested that working in hot weather increased the odds of a work-related injury. Also, during heat waves, the risk of work-related injuries increased by 17.4%. Male workers and young workers were at highest risk of a work-related injury during hot weather. Outdoor work involving intensive work, including agriculture and construction were at high risk of injuries during high temperatures. Also, male, young and new workers were at a higher risk of injuries during heat weaves.

Quote from the study: “There is an urgent need to mitigate the impacts of occupational heat stress in the context of climate change and the anticipated rise in environmental heat stress. The risk of [occupational injuries] associated with extreme heat is not evenly distributed and is dependent on underlying climatic conditions, workers’ characteristics, nature of work, and workplace characteristics.”

Additional research

• Analysis of Heat Exposure During Pregnancy and Severe Maternal Morbidity
  Anqi Jiao, et al. JAMA Network Open, September 2023.
• QuickStats: Age-Adjusted Rates of Death Involving Exposure to Excessive Heat* Among States with the Highest Numbers of Deaths — National Vital Statistics System, United States, 2021
  Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, September 2023.
• Impact of heat on emergency hospital admission in Texas: geographic and racial/ethnic disparities
  Chunyu Guo, et al. Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology, August 2023.
• Heat waves and adaptation: A global systematic review
  Maryam Kiarsi, et al. Journal of Thermal Biology, August 2023.
• Predicting climate-change induced heat-related illness risk in Grand Canyon National Park visitors
  Danielle E. Buttke, Brinkley Raynor and Gregor W. Schuurman. PLoS One, August 2023.
• Extreme Temperature Events, Fine Particulate Matter, and Myocardial Infarction Mortality
  Ruijun Xo, et al. Circulation, July 2023.
• Association between ambient temperature and risk of stroke morbidity and mortality: A systematic review and meta-analysis
  Jing Wen, et al. Brain and Behavior, June 2023.
• Heat and health inequity: acting on determinants of health to promote heat justice
  Jeremy Hess. Nature Reviews Nephrology, January 2023.
• Urban extreme heat, climate change, and saving lives: Lessons from Washington state
  Zachary Kearl and Jason Vogel, Urban Climate, January 2023.
• Heat and air quality related cause-based elderly mortalities and emergency visits
  Mohamed Dardir, Jeffrey Wilson and Umberto Berardi. Environmental Research, January 2023.
• Association between ambient temperature and heat waves with mortality in South Asia: Systematic review and meta-analysis
  Asya Dimitrova, et al. Environment International, December 2020.
• Clinical Implications of Climate Change on US Emergency Medicine: Challenges and Opportunities
  Cecilia J. Sorensen, et al. Annals of Emergency Medicine, August 2020.
• Associations between high ambient temperatures and heat waves with mental health outcomes: a systematic review
  R. Thompson, et al. Public Health, August 2018.
• Differences in Heat-Related Mortality by Citizenship Status: United States, 2005-2014
  Ethel V. Taylor, et al. American Journal of Public Health, April 2018.
• Risk of death related to psychotropic drug use in older people during the European 2003 heatwave: a population-based case-control study
  Clementine Nordon, et al. American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, December 2009.

Resources

• The U.S. National Integrated Heat Health Information System (heat.gov) provides a wide range of heat-related information, including extreme health events and emergency medical services responses to heat-related illnesses across the country.
• Use CDC’s Heat & Health Tracker to find local information on extreme heat events.
• Check CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports for data on national heat-related illnesses and deaths.
• GlobalChange.gov, or the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is a federal program mandated by Congress to coordinate research and investment toward understanding the forces that affect society. The site has several resources, including climate summaries for each state.
• Climate Central is an independent group of scientists and communicators who research and report on climate change and how it affects people’s lives.
• The OSHA-NIOSH Heat Safety Tool App can be used for planning outdoor work activities. It provides real-time heat index and hourly forecasts specific to a location.
• “Climate Changes Health: Extreme Heat” is an infographic by the nonprofit National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Foundation, illustrating various ways extreme heat affects health.
• Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University brings together scientists and communities to develop and deploy solutions that reduce the impact of extreme heat on human health.
• Climate Resilience for Frontline Clinics Toolkit is a collaboration between The Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Americares, providing information of providers and patients to meet health care challenges from climate change.
• Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington focuses on the connections between climate change and human health.
• The Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Units is a network of experts in reproductive and children’s environmental health, including a list of providers by state.

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From the U.S. to Canada to Greece, wildfires have been wreaking havoc across the globe in recent months, burning land, forests and homes, and killing or displacing wildlife and humans. The smoke can affect people near and far from the fires.

Wildfire smoke is a mix of gases and fine particles from burning trees, plants, buildings, and other material, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The smoke contains small pollutants known as particle matter, or PM 2.5, which are 30 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. These particles can go deep into the lungs and reach the bloodstream.

Exposure to wildfire smoke can irritate the lungs, cause inflammation, alter immune function, and increase susceptibility to respiratory infections, including COVID-19, according to the CDC. In June, the agency issued an advisory to health professionals about the acute signs and symptoms of smoke exposure, as smoke from wildfires in Canada affected air quality in parts of U.S.

Moreover, wildfires can upend people’s lives, leading to mental stress.

Several studies have established the short-term health effects of wildfire exposure, finding an association with higher risk of death and respiratory and cardiovascular complications. A 2022 study, published in Science of the Total Environment, finds the Australian bushfires in 2019 and 2020 were associated with a 6% increase in emergency department visits for respiratory diseases and 10% increase for cardiovascular diseases.

But there’s still a dearth of population-based high-quality evidence on the long-term health effects of wildfires, according to the authors of “Long-term impacts of non-occupational wildfire exposure on human health: A systematic review,” published in Environmental Pollution in March 2023.

The authors review 36 academic studies, mostly from Australia, Canada and the U.S., which were published between 1987 and 2022. The majority focus on health impacts one to two years after exposure to a wildfire. More than half of the studies focus on mental health. The authors note that most of the included studies were from developed countries with limited data.

Study findings

The analysis finds in the long term, wildfires and wildfire smoke are associated with mental health disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, respiratory diseases and COVID-19 complications, death from heart disease and poorer general health.

Among the findings:

There was no significant long-term association between wildfire exposure and child mortality and hospitalization due to respiratory diseases.

Several studies showed an association between wildfire exposure and increased risk of flu rates, asthma in children and different types of cancer.

One study from Israel found higher hospitalization rates two years after wildfire exposure compared with the year before the wildfire occurred. In addition, people with underlying health conditions, such as overweight or obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and lower income had higher rates of hospitalizations than those without underlying health conditions and higher income.

Two studies found that wildfire exposure is associated with shorter height in children, especially when moms were exposed to the smoke during the pregnancy. One study suggests that may be due to the impact of wildfire smoke on pregnant moms’ respiratory health. 

The authors of the systematic review add that current evidence, although limited, suggests people with certain vulnerabilities — including smoking, lower levels of education, obesity, older age, underlying diseases and lower income — might be at higher risk of negative long-term effects of wildfire exposure.

All 21 studies that assessed the association between wildfire exposure and mental health found negative impacts in adults. Those associations include anger problems, possible post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and heavy drinking. Most studies found a higher rate of PTSD symptoms after exposure to wildfires.

There are several reasons why wildfires have long-term impacts on health, the authors of the systematic review explain.

• Direct impact, including long-term injuries, and even death, resulting from burns and inhalation of smoke during the fires.
• Indirect impact via air pollution and mental stress resulting from economic loss, casualties and forced evacuations.
• Damage at the cellular and molecular level. Air pollution, including smoke, might cause DNA damage, decrease the viability of cells and result in cell death. The smoke can also lead to inflammation in the body and the brain.

“The population-based high-quality evidence with quantitative analysis on this topic is still limited,” they write. “Given the long-term projections of increasing frequency of wildfires and length of the wildfire season due to climate change, the anticipated increase in the frequency and acreage burned by prescribed fires, and the increasing aging population that is more vulnerable to suffer from long-term impacts of wildfire exposure, more scientific evidence is urgently needed to determine long-term impacts of wildfire exposure on human health.”

Wildfires and climate change

Compared with 2001 to 2004, nearly 60% of countries experienced an increased number of days that people were exposed to very or extremely high fire risk and 72% of countries had increased human wildfire exposure during 2017 to 2020, the study authors note.

The intensity and frequency of wildfires is increasing in the U.S. and worldwide. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there were 20 wildfires that caused more than $1 billion in damage between 1980 and 2021 in the U.S. Sixteen of those have occurred since 2000, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.

Wildfires are among the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change indictors, which show the causes and effects of climate change. Wildfires occur naturally and play a role in maintaining the ecosystems in forests and grasslands, but too many wildfires can throw off the nature’s balance.

Wildfire season has gotten longer and there are more wildfires affecting more areas. This increase is due to several factors, including warmer springs, longer dry summers and drier soil and vegetation, according to the EPA.

Funding

The study was funded by the Australian Research Council and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. The authors declared no competing financial interests.

How to access this study

Environmental Pollution is published by Elsevier, a Dutch publishing company specializing in scientific research. This study is behind Elsevier’s paywall, but there are several ways you can access it, including emailing the senior author, Shanshan Li. We also have a list of academic journals and publishing companies that offer journalists access to their content upon request.

Additional research

• Preterm birth and term low birth weight associated with wildfire-specific PM2.5: A cohort study in New South Wales, Australia during 2016–2019 Yiwen Zhang, et al. Environment International, April 2023.
• Wildfire smoke and symptoms affecting mental health among adults in the U.S. state of Oregon Maria C. Mirabelli, et al. Preventive Medicine, November 2022.
• Exposure to wildfire-related PM2.5 and site-specific cancer mortality in Brazil from 2010 to 2016: A retrospective study Pei Yu, et al. September 2022, PLOS Medicine.
• Long-term health effects of wildfire exposure: A scoping review Emily Grant and Jennifer D. Runkle. The Journal of Climate Change and Health, May 2022.
• Long-term exposure to wildfires and cancer incidence in Canada: a population-based observational cohort study Jill Korsiak, et al. The Lancet Planetary Health, May 2022.
• Wildfire exposure during pregnancy and the risk of adverse birth outcomes: A systematic review Sana Amjad, et al. Environment International, November 2021.
• Mortality risk attributable to wildfire-related PM2·5 pollution: a global time series study in 749 locations
  Gongbo Chen, et al. The Lancet Planetary Health, September 2021.
• Risk and burden of hospital admissions associated with wildfire-related PM2·5 in Brazil, 2000–15: a nationwide time-series study Tingting Ye, et al. The Lancet Planetary Health, September 2021.
• Psychological effects of the 2017 California wildfires on children and youth with disabilities Elizabeth McAdams Ducy and Laura M. Stough. Research in Developmental Disabilities, July 2021.
• Wildfires, Global Climate Change, and Human Health Rongbin Xu, et al. The New England Journal of Medicine, November 2020.
• The health impacts and economic value of wildland fire episodes in the U.S.: 2008–2012 Neal Fann, et al. Science of The Total Environment, January 2018.

Resources to track wildfires and air quality

• The Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) U.S./Canada shows all active fires in the two countries. FIRMS also provides a map of wildfires around the world.
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow shows the level of air quality based in ZIP code, city or state. AirNow also has a fire and smoke map.
• The National Interagency Fire Center provides current data on wildfires in the U.S., including the number of firefighters fighting the fires and the acres burned.
• The CDC has a guide on how people can protect themselves from wildfire smoke.
• The wildfires layer on Google Maps shows active wildfires.
• Several news outlets track wildfires or air quality and smoke from wildfires, including The New York Times and CNN.

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There’s a growing realization in the health care community about the toll that the practice of medicine takes on the Earth.

The health care industry “is among the most carbon-intensive service sectors in the industrialized world,” accounting for between 4.4% and 4.6% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a key paper on this topic, published in 2020 in Health Affairs.

In the United States, the toll is particularly heavy. It’s estimated that the health care sector produced about 8.5% of domestic greenhouse gas emissions in 2018, according to that paper. It also notes the U.S. medical system may be responsible for about a quarter of all global health care greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than the health care system of any other nation.

The Biden administration highlighted its efforts to reduce these kinds of emissions during the United Nations Climate Conference (COP27) in November. U.S. delegates announced that more than 100 health care organizations have signed the voluntary Health Sector Climate Pledge initiative that the Department of Health and Human Services created with the White House. In kicking off this initiative in June, Adm. Rachel Levine, a pediatrician who serves as assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, stressed the link between climate change and illness.

“We’re already seeing the damage done by extreme heat, wildfires, severe storms, and increasing chronic disease burdens, all associated with climate change,” said Levine in a June 30 statement.

Levine described the Health Sector Climate Pledge initiative as “the beginning of a longer ongoing effort with partners from across the industry, which is exactly the kind of big response we need as a country.”

Organizations that sign the pledge have agreed to try to reduce emissions linked to climate change by 50% by 2030, from a baseline level set no earlier than 2008.

While certainly a positive step, this White House initiative depends on the goodwill of hospital administrators and leaders of companies that make medical products. Put bluntly, it is a strictly voluntary pledge and has no guarantee of lasting beyond the Biden administration.

The organizations that signed this pledge “are not obligated to report data on their progress to the federal government in association with this pledge,” according to an FAQ on the HHS website.

Weaving environmental efforts into the practice of medicine

Some leaders in medicine have recommendations for ways to secure more lasting incentives to reduce the carbon footprint of healthcare. They want to leverage the clout of the federal government as the nation’s biggest purchaser of health care and drive changes through regulation, such as a mandate to report on efforts to address climate change.

Among those advocating for regulation is Jodi Sherman, an associate professor of anesthesiology and epidemiology at Yale School of Medicine University, who spearheaded development of the Yale Gassing Greener app. This allows her fellow anesthesiologists to easily see how much pollution they can avoid through different choices of inhalation gases during surgeries.  She also is an author of professional guidance intended to help anesthesiologists better understand how their choices of gases affect emissions, and one of many authors of the previously cited 2020 Health Affairs paper.

Sherman maintains that efforts to reduce health care’s contribution to climate change should be woven into the practice of medicine. “This is the new frontier for patient safety where we are looking beyond the patient in front of us,” she says.

In covering this topic, journalists need to dig beyond press releases and statements from health care organizations about their support for the broad goal of reducing the carbon footprint. They should press hospital leaders and executives of medical supply companies for concrete examples of their plans to reduce their organizations’ carbon footprints. And they should look at what the research says.

The United Kingdom’s Sustainable Development Unit

Researchers who have studied the health care sector’s effect on climate change suggest the United States look to a United Kingdom program as a model. 

The U.K.’s  National Health Service has been a leader for many years in keeping tabs on emissions, a key step toward reducing them. It created a Sustainable Development Unit in 2008, and began that year conducting assessments of the NHS’s carbon footprint, write Imogen Tennison and her co-authors in a 2021 article published in The Lancet.

“Regularly updated and improved upon, these assessments now constitute the longest-running effort to quantify health-care-related greenhouse gas emissions in the world,” they write of the work of the Sustainable Development Unit.

The U.S. differs from the U.K., which has a centralized government-run health system as its dominant provider of medical care. But to truly make a difference in the U.S., the federal government should require health care organizations to report on their emissions, Sherman and her coauthors argue in their 2020 Health Affairs article, Health Care Pollution And Public Health Damage In The United States: An Update.

“Mandated emissions reporting would inform science-based interventions and facilitate rapid adoption of sustainable health care practices that could dramatically reduce health care pollution and improve public health,” they write.

The United States has a complex medical system, involving a mix of public and private initiatives and laws in 50 states plus the District of Columbia, as well as regulations enforced by federal agencies. But many U.S. hospitals and medical offices depend on payments from the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which are the nation’s largest purchasers of health care.

There are at least two promising ideas for attaching emission reporting rules to Medicare payments:

1. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services could require reporting emissions data as one of its conditions for paying for health care services.
2. There could be a mandate from The Joint Commission,  a nonprofit organization on which CMS heavily relies to check on how well hospitals are run. Loss of accreditation from The Joint Commission puts at risk hospitals’ Medicare payments, which are the financial lifeblood of many of these organizations. If the Joint Commission showed more interest in reporting on emissions, it could inspire hospital leaders to track them, even if this didn’t rise to the level of a threat to payment.

Scope 1, 2 and 3

Before we delve into these suggestions, let’s go over the widely used Scope 1, 2 and 3 framework for discussing greenhouse gases. These classifications are part of the comprehensive standardized framework created by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which resulted from a partnership between the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

The authors of the 2020 Health Affairs update describe these classifications in their paper as follows:

• Scope 1 refers to greenhouse gas emissions emitted directly from health care facilities, such as from on-site boilers and certain medical gases.
• Scope 2 covers those emitted indirectly through purchased electricity.
• Scope 3 refers to those emitted in the supply chain through the production of goods and services procured by health systems.

For more on this, see this World Resources Institute primer.

CMS raises the question

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services this year asked the public for feedback about how health organizations can track greenhouse gases, a move that signals the agency may eventually take steps in this direction.

The agency included a request for information on ways to address climate change in its draft update of the Medicare payment rule for inpatient services for fiscal 2023. CMS uses its annual payment rules as vehicles to make myriad changes in the conditions it attaches to its payments.

CMS released the proposed Medicare rule for 2023 payments for hospital inpatient services in April. (You can find all of the comments on this wide-ranging proposed rule posted here. There’s a search box that lets you home in on comments that addressed CMS’ questions on climate change. Tip for journalists who work for a regional news outlet: Try searching on the name of a state and the term “climate change”.)

Among the questions CMS posed was whether hospitals or health systems are setting “time-bound, public aims” for addressing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The reactions were mixed.

Already noted as a leader in this area, the staff of the Cleveland Clinic, for example, told CMS that it has a goal to be carbon neutral by 2027, in terms of both Scope 1 and 2 emissions. The comment also said the clinic “would support the establishment of time-bound goals for GHG emissions reduction in the health care industry sector-wide.”

These statements were parts of the Cleveland Clinic’s comment to CMS on the draft Medicare payment rule. (Comments on federal rules are posted on the Regulations.gov website, which can be a great source for journalists.)

In contrast, the American Hospital Association (AHA) urged CMS to consider the burden of potential new rules on its members, while also stating broad support for the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Older physical structures, for example, may not be able to undergo the same type of retrofitting of heating or cooling systems compared with newer ones, AHA said in a June comment to CMS.

The hospital lobbying group also questioned whether HHS “has the legal authority to impose requirements on hospitals to address threats created by climate change.”

In their Health Affairs article, Sherman and her coauthors argue for using Medicare’s existing frameworks intended to judge the quality of medical care to create a system for tracking the carbon footprints of hospital systems. (See Exhibit 4 of their paper for a more detailed discussion of ways that existing CMS metrics could be expanded to address climate change.)

The Joint Commission and a proposed SEC rule

Jonathan Perlin, who became the  president and chief executive of The Joint Commission in March, discussed his plans to address climate change in an October interview with New England Journal of Medicine’s NEJM Catalyst. Perlin said decarbonization efforts are critical because “climate change is having a direct and inequitable effect on the health and well-being of people globally.”

Perlin also spoke about convening a technical advisory panel to consider this issue, in part to consider ways to encourage health systems to address reducing their own carbon footprints.

It would be wise for journalists to keep tabs on Perlin’s plans to address the carbon footprint, says Brian Chesebro, an anesthesiologist and the medical director for environmental stewardship at Providence Health Oregon. There are important stories to be written about any action The Joint Commission takes in this area, he says.

“The Joint Commission has tremendous influence over the operations of health care and tremendous influence over the leadership,” Chesebro says.

In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission in March proposed a rule that would require many companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, as well as their potential financial losses from climate change.

The proposed SEC rule applies broadly to publicly traded companies. This would include companies such as HCA Healthcare, a for-profit hospital system, which as of September owned and operated 182 hospitals. It would also apply to companies that make drugs, medical devices and health supplies.

As of December, though, the SEC had yet to finalize the proposal. And the commission faced pushback from industry groups — as well as from one of its own members.

The climate change proposal would not produce the kind of “comparable, consistent, and reliable disclosures” that the commission wanted, said SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce, in a March statement to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. Pierce was appointed as an SEC commissioner in 2018 following a nomination by then President Donald Trump.

The SEC proposal asks some large companies to provide information about the carbon footprint of their suppliers, customers, employees and other factors such as changing weather patterns. 

In a public statement issued for a March 2022 SEC meeting, Pierce said she understands the drive to “bring clarity in an area where there has been a lot of confusion and greenwashing,” using a term for efforts to make companies and organizations seem more environmentally responsible than they are.

But Pierce questioned whether the SEC would get the results it sought from its proposal, arguing about challenges ahead in gathering reliable data and analyses.

Research roundup

In the research roundup below, we’ve gathered and summarized analyses on emissions, as well as papers outlining the challenges of gathering data on the carbon footprint of the U.S. healthcare sector.

The first two studies could be considered required reading for journalists delving into this topic, as they contain solid estimates of changes in the contribution of health care organizations to climate change in the U.K. and U.S.

The other five papers present analyses and thoughtful plans and suggestions on topics including:

• How reducing use of over-testing and low-value treatments could help shrink the carbon footprint of U.S. health care.
• A detailed list of actions the federal government could take to leverage its financial clout as a purchaser of health care and a supporter of medical research and training.
• How to reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to manufacturing of medical devices
• Reconsidering travel to medical conferences.

Health Care’s Response to Climate Change: A Carbon Footprint Assessment of the NHS in England
Imogen Tennison; et al. The Lancet Planetary Health, February 2021.

The carbon footprint of the U.K.’s NHS fell by 26% from 1990 to 2019, mostly due to reduced use of certain kinds of inhalers and in forms of energy used for heat and power, the authors write.

This was the key conclusion of what the authors describe as “the longest and most comprehensive accounting of national health-care emissions globally.” In addition to highlighting the major wins in reducing the carbon footprint, the study illustrates areas where growth in emissions was at least held in check amid rising demand for medical services.

The total tally for the NHS in England dropped from 33.8 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2e) in 1990 to 25.0 Mt CO2e in 2019, the study finds.

Among the biggest contributors to that decline was a change in production of metered dose inhalers, stemming from the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international treaty designed to reduce production of products that deplete the Earth’s protective layer of ozone. It set in motion efforts to phase-out of chlorofluorocarbon propellants in metered dose inhalers, which are used for asthma and other lung conditions. (There are still concerns, though, about emissions from inhalers.

The carbon footprint for metered dose inhalers dropped from 4.64 Mt CO2e in 1990 to 0.80 in 2019.

The carbon footprint attributed to oil dropped from 1.74 Mt CO2e to 0.02 Mt CO2e. This analysis weighed both the reduction in the NHS’ direct consumption of oil for its energy needs, a Scope 1 use, and oil consumed in the supply chain of the NHS, the Scope 3 uses.

It’s important to note that during the study period, the population of England increased by 17% and the NHS England’s provision of care doubled, in terms of a measure as hospital stays.

The carbon footprint for travel related to the NHS did tick up during the 1990-2019 period, rising from 1.9 Mt CO2e to 2.4 Mt CO2e. This figure includes commutes by NHS staff as well as trips by patients and visitors.

In the paper, the authors highlight the 2008 creation of the NHS’ Sustainable Development Unit, which has closely tracked carbon footprint, as a contributor to their analysis.

“Regularly updated and improved upon, these assessments now constitute the longest-running effort to quantify health-care-related greenhouse gas emissions in the world, and are notably the only national-level analyses carried out by a public agency with institutional support, rather than by independent researchers,” the authors write.

To hear Tenninson and co-author Matthew J. Eckelman discuss this paper, check out this episode of the Lancet’s Planetary Health podcast.

Health Care Pollution And Public Health Damage In The United States: An Update
Matthew J. Eckelman; et al. Health Affairs, December 2020.

U.S. health care greenhouse gas emissions rose 6% from 2010 to 2018, reaching 1,692 kg per capita in 2018 — the highest rate among industrialized nations, the authors write. In other terms, they reached about 553 Mt CO2e in 2018, or approximately 8.5% of domestic U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, the authors write.

This figure — 8.5% — has been widely cited, including by the White House in its June statement on the Health Sector Climate Pledge.

In making these estimates, the authors used data from the Environmentally-Extended Input-Output model (USEEIO), developed by the EPA. This model melds data on economic transactions between 389 industry sectors, with emissions data that the EPA describes as “a wealth of environmental information, including data on land, water, energy and mineral use, air pollution, nutrients, and toxics.”

The paper also includes estimates of state-level emissions. Midwestern and Northeastern states generally have higher per capita emissions than Western or Southern states, the authors report.

Their calculations also suggest that in 2018 greenhouse gas and toxic air pollutant emissions resulted in the loss of 388,000 disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs). DALY is a tool researchers use to show a broader picture of the effects of a harmful substance or practice on people. (The World Health Organization explains that a DALY represents the loss of the equivalent of one year of full health. DALYs for a disease or health condition are the sum of the years of life lost to due to premature mortality and the years lived with a disability due to prevalent cases of the disease or health condition in a population, the WHO explains.)

This disease burden is “within the same order of magnitude as years of life lost as a result of deaths from preventable medical errors and it remains a concerning issue for health care safety, quality, and cost containment efforts,” the authors write.

Why Climate Activists Should Care About Healthcare Waste and Overuse
Daisy Valdivieso and Thomas B. Newman. The Journal of Climate Change and Health, October 2022.

The authors call for greater efforts to reduce use of medical tests and procedures that are considered unlikely to deliver significant benefit as an easy way to shrink the carbon footprint of medical care.

They cite the work of the The American Board of Internal Medicine’s Choosing Wisely program as a resource in weighing what tests and procedures patients and clinicians should consider skipping. Choosing Wisely collects recommendations from specialists who have reviewed studies about treatments and tests commonly used in their fields.

This approach also plays more to the strength of people practicing medicine than do strategies more focused on reducing energy consumption in a broad sense.

“Emissions from buildings, ventilation, and lighting are not healthcare workers’ area of expertise, but we do have expertise in identifying low-value care,” the authors write. “Drawing connections between the high cost of healthcare and healthcare waste can help draw urgency to the matter.”

Prescriptions for Mitigating Climate Change–Related Externalities in Cancer Care: A Surgeon’s Perspective
Victor Agbafe; et al. Journal of Clinical Oncology, March 2022.

This paper provides an overview of efforts underway in medicine to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, with an emphasis on cancer surgeries. Its suggestions include ways to reduce emissions from operating rooms such as scheduled preventive maintenance.

It also touches on efforts to avoid unnecessary waste in the surgical supply chain. Trays of instruments prepared for operations sometimes have unnecessary or rarely used sterile instruments, which could be weeded out by more selective preparation, the authors write.

Confronting Health Care’s Climate Crisis Conundrum : The Federal Government as Catalyst for Change
Kenneth W. Kizer and Kari Christine Nadeau, JAMA, January 2022.

In the Viewpoint article, Kizer and Nadeau urge a broad application of what’s been learned about quality metrics to efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the U.S. health care sector.

More public reporting is needed to understand the scope of the problem and identify solutions, the authors write.

“First, the president could direct all federal agencies that provide health care to begin reporting on the environmental and societal consequences of their operations in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative framework and standards for environment, social, and governance (ESG) reporting,” they write.

“Government health systems do not disclose these data (and very rarely do private health care organizations), unlike more than 90% of the Standard & Poor’s top 500 companies and many nongovernment entities,” they add.

Other suggestions include:

• Direct CMS to require all recipients of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program funds to begin ESG reporting.

• Have the VA and the Defense Department require ESG reporting from the private health care providers with whom they contract.

• The Food and Drug Administration could include ESG reporting as a requirement in applications for approval of new medicines and medical devices. Kizer and Nadeau write that the U.K.’s National Health Service and its equivalent of the FDA — the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency — already do this.

• The federal government could require that institutions receiving research funds from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, or other federal government agencies report on ESG performance and develop sustainability plans. The government could also leverage its role as the biggest funder of physician training, graduate medical education and other health professional training, to demand climate change education be included in the curriculum of programs.

“This could constitute a substantial step toward better equipping health professionals to confront climate change and other planetary health problems,” they write. Educational institutions receiving such funds also could be required to report on ESG performance.

Estimation of the Carbon Footprint Associated With Attendees of the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting
Joshua R. Wortzel; et al. JAMA Network Open, January 2021.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) saved the estimated equivalent of burning 500 acres of dense forest, or 22 million pounds of coal, when it opted for a virtual annual conference in 2020 due to the pandemic, the authors write.

There’s tension between the APA’s having made a priority of addressing the effects of climate change on mental health, while holding one of the world’s largest annual psychiatric conferences, according to the paper.

With that in mind, the authors created a study that included data from the APA about the cities and countries of origin of about 16,620 attendees at the 2018 annual meeting and about 13,335 at the 2019 annual meeting.

The authors then identified likely transportation modes and departure airports for each attendee based on their distance from the meetings. Estimates for emissions for attendees considered to be within driving distance were based on Environmental Protection Agency’s guidelines. For flying emissions estimates, the authors used the Flight Emissions API (GoClimate) web tool. They concluded that the 2018 New York City and 2019 San Francisco APA annual meetings produced an estimated 19,819 and 21,456 metric tons of CO2e emissions, respectively.

This analysis was not meant to discourage in-person conferences, but to spark consideration of ways to reduce their carbon footprint, the authors write. “Creative workarounds” such as greater use of virtual meetings should be considered, they conclude.

Transforming The Medical Device Industry: Road Map To A Circular Economy
Andrea J. MacNeill; et al. Health Affairs, December 2020.

The authors of this analysis argue for a shift toward more reusable products, which might be less profitable for some manufacturers but better for the planet. “Single-use blood pressure cuffs, for example, have been introduced to obviate the need for cleaning, despite little evidence that reusable cuffs are significant vectors of pathogens when properly reprocessed,” the authors write.

They write that despite broad adoption of single-use disposable products, there is no compelling evidence that they reduce infections acquired during surgery or other health care.

“Most of the decrease in surgical site infection rates from 4–6 percent in 1987–90 to 2 percent in 2009 can be attributed to the use of evidence-based protocols to standardize care and enhance host defense mechanisms (for example, glycemic control and normothermia),” they write.

They argue for an “expanded notion of patient safety that considers population health,” and which “would take into account the social and environmental damages of the current single-use disposable–dominant health care supply chain.”

The authors argue that regulators should take responsibility for the safe sale and reuse of medical devices. They could, for example, restrict single-use disposable labeling to products for which safe reuse cannot be reasonably demonstrated, instead of allowing single-use disposable labeling by default.

Additional resources

Commonwealth Fund’s Climate Change and Health Care initiative website:                      

This respected nonprofit organization is seeking to help health systems with tools, and resources to reduce their carbon emissions. It also is supporting new academic research to measure, compare, and reduce the health system’s carbon footprint. Among its recent publications of interest to journalists are:

• How the Inflation Reduction Act Can Help the Health Care Sector Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Sept. 22, 2022. This blog post looks at how a major 2022 law on environmental and health policy may help medical systems and organizations try to reduce their emissions.     
• Action to Decarbonize the U.S. Health Care System: Lessons from the U.K.’s National Health Service, July 26, 2022. This blog post looks in more detail at NHS England efforts at decarbonization, which were described earlier in this article.

National Academy of Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Decarbonizing the U.S. Health Sector: A leading U.S. coordinator of health care initiatives is seeking to help medical organizations share ideas for reducing their carbon footprints. Its plans include holding meetings and seeking other ways to share suggestions.

American Medical Association (AMA) Climate Change website: The largest organization of doctors in the United States has been speaking in support of efforts to reduce emissions. It has called on doctors to assist in educating patients and the public on the physical and mental health effects of climate change and on environmentally sustainable practices, and to serve as role models for promoting environmental sustainability.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is a federal agency that tries to have medical practices supported by research used more widely in health care. AHRQ contracted with the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to develop a primer with suggestions for reducing emissions.

Health Care Without Harm: A global group with a U.S. operation that seeks to help reduce the environmental footprint of the health care sector.

The Journalist’s Resource:

• The 2022 Lancet climate change and health report: Dire warnings and glimmers of hope (November 21, 2022)

• 7 tips for finding local stories in The Lancet’s health and climate change report (October 27, 2022)

• Want to reach skeptics? Researchers suggest leaving the term ‘climate change’ out of some news coverage (May 28, 2022)

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Dr. Renee Salas sees the effects of climate change in the patients she treats in the emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“Asthma flares, heart attacks, heatstroke, mental health crises; I can put a Band-Aid on these problems but then I send my patients back out into the world,” Salas said during a virtual panel hosted by the American Public Health Association in October. “Prescribing an asthma inhaler isn’t going to fix the cause of an asthma attack for a young boy living next to a highway where cars are producing dangerous pollutants and climate change is driving increases in wildfire smoke pollen and ozone pollution.”

Salas, a Yerby Fellow at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, was speaking about the release of the seventh annual Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change report on October 25. She’s one of the report’s authors.

The annual report, which is authored by 99 experts from 51 academic institutions and agencies across the world, tracks the impact of climate change on global health. And this year it finds that continued dependence on fossil fuels threatens the health and survival of people around the world.

The report “shows the direst finding yet,” the authors write.  At 1.1 C above pre-industrial levels now, “climate change is increasingly undermining every pillar of good health and compounding the health impacts of the current COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts.” Yet, “mitigation efforts remain inadequate to avert a catastrophic temperature rise,” they add.

This year’s report builds on “The 2021 report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Code Red for a Healthy Future,” which showed that every year, in every region of the world, the impact of a warming climate on human health is getting worse compared with previous years, and that climate change is further exacerbating health inequities.

In his speech in November at the UN climate change conference Framework Convention on Climate Change 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Egypt, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

About the report

The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal founded in 1823, has been publishing the Countdown on Health and Climate Change reports for the past seven years.

The report uses 43 indicators to monitor the association between climate change and health. These indicators explore topics such as the connection between health and heat, extreme weather events like wildfires and drought, the link between climate change and increase in infectious disease transmission, and the impact of climate change on food insecurity. The report also explores climate change policies across countries and the economic impacts of climate change, including the costs of heat-related deaths due to factors such as years of life lost.

Among the new indicators this year are the impact of extreme temperatures on food insecurity, exposure to wildfire smoke, and household air pollution.

The report also has policy briefs for several countries, including the United States.

Global findings, in brief

The 43 indicators in this year’s report are presented in five groups: Health hazards, exposures, and impacts; Adaptation, planning, and resilience for health; Migration actions and health co-benefits; Economics and finance; and Public and political engagement.

Here are some of the global findings:

• Heat-related deaths increased by 68% between 2000 and 2021.

• The COVID-19 pandemic not only has impacted health, it also has had an adverse economic effect on small and large-scale investments toward climate action. Nearly 30% of the 798 cities around the world reviewed in the report reduced financing available for climate action in 2021.

The world is on track to reach 2.4 C to 3.5 C above pre-industrial times by 2100, and there’s a 48% chance that the 1.5 C threshold proposed in the Paris Agreement will be exceeded within the next five years. Geopolitical conflicts and the COVID-19 pandemic have made the 1.5 C threshold less likely to be met, the authors write.

“Current policies put the world on track to catastrophic 2.7 C increase by the end of the century,” they write.

The U.S. report, in brief

As a child, Natasha DeJarnett noticed she couldn’t breathe well when she visited her grandparents, who lived in a different neighborhood from her own.

Years later, through a graduate research project, she discovered that this was because her grandparents lived in an area with poor air quality due to the presence of steel mills, toxic sites, interstates and an airport, recalled DeJarnett, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Louisville, during an APHA virtual panel. She is the co-lead author of the 2022 U.S. Climate Countdown policy brief, along with Naomi Beyeler. The other authors of the study are Salas, Paige Lester, and Dr. Jeremy Hes.

“The burning of fossil fuels is driving climate change and decreasing the quality of the air that we breathe in,” DeJarnett said during an APHA virtual panel. “Cities that have higher air pollution levels also have higher death rates. In fact, poor air quality is linked with adverse impacts to every major organ system in the body.”

This year’s U.S. policy brief focuses on how air pollution, heat waves, infectious diseases and mental health are hurting people, and everyone is at the risk of experiencing the health impacts of climate change. But health impacts of climate change are not experienced equally, according to the report.

“Structural racism and economic injustice amplify climate change-related health inequities by increasing susceptibility and exposure to climate threats and reducing the adaptive capacity of communities targeted by discriminatory policies,” the authors write.

Heat is the top cause of natural weather-related deaths in the U.S., DeJarnett said.

“This is a great concern because we have an extended and hotter warm season along with heat waves that are longer, more frequent and more intense,” she said.

Heat-related deaths for people over age 65 are estimated to have increased by approximately 74% from 2000-2004 to 2017-2021, the report shows. A total of 3,066 heat-related deaths occurred in the U.S. from 2018 to 2020, according to the report.

Extreme heat can also have adverse physical and mental health impacts on children. High temperatures impair their ability to learn in school and make it harder for kids to safely play outdoors, according to the U.S. policy brief. Extreme heat also increases the odds of poor birth outcomes. For people who work in outdoor settings, it increases the risk of kidney disease.

Climate change creates environmental conditions more conducive to disease transmission, including Vibrio bacteria through water, and lime and West Nile diseases through ticks and other insects.

The 2022 U.S. report also spotlights mental health.

“Susceptibility to the mental health impacts of climate change is higher for communities with close ties to the land, including people living in rural and agricultural areas and Indigenous communities, and for children and young people,” the authors of the brief write. “Systemic stressors, such as economic insecurity and discrimination, can exacerbate climate change threats to mental health and hinder equitable access to protective services and resources.”

“This is a vitally important health outcome, but it’s harder to measure,” said DeJarnett. “There is strong evidence that climate change is associated with more depression, stress, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.”

Other reports have also highlighted the impact of climate change on mental health.

The 2021 report by the American Psychological Association, “Mental Health and Our Changing Climate,” describes the short- and long-term impact of climate change on mental health.

“Heat can fuel mood and anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, vascular dementia, use of emergency mental health services, suicide, interpersonal aggression, and violence,” the report’s authors write. “Drought can lead to stress, anxiety, depression, uncertainty, shame, humiliation, and suicide, particularly amongst farmers.”

The carbon footprint of the American health care system

Of the 37 health systems analyzed individually in the global Lancet report, the U.S. had the most emissions per person — 50 times the emissions from the health care sector in India.

The U.S. health sector is responsible for 8.5 % of the nation’s carbon emissions, according to a 2021 perspective article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

These emissions stem directly from the operations of health care facilities and indirectly from both purchased sources of energy, heating, and cooling and the supply chain of health care services and goods, according to the article’s authors.

“Ameliorating the sector’s environmental effects and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions could not only improve health for everyone, but also reduce costs of care,” they write.

The National Academy of Medicine has launched the Action Collaborative on Decarbonizing the U.S. Health Sector, a public-private partnership of leaders and organizations from across the health systems, to address the sector’s environmental impact.

“Improving the carbon footprint of the entire health ecosystem can drastically lower the approximately 8.5% of U.S. carbon emissions for which it is responsible, while also having significant health, social, and economic benefits,” according to the collaborative’s website.

The American Medical Association has also added to its existing policy a goal to decarbonize the U.S. health sector, the organization announced on Nov. 15 during its 2022 Interim Meeting.

“Physicians pledge to do no harm, and now it is time for the health sector to do the same by joining forces to commit to decarbonization and public health,” AMA Trustee Drayton Charles Harvey said in a statement posted on the organization’s website.

Glimmers of hope

The report highlights some “emerging glimmers of hope.”

“Although the health sector is responsible for 5·2% of all global emissions, it has shown impressive climate leadership, and 60 countries had committed to transitioning to climate-resilient and/or low-carbon or net-zero carbon health systems as part of the COP26 Health Program, as of July, 2022,” the authors write.

More city leaders are identifying risks of climate change on the health of their populations, “a first step to delivering a tailored response that strengthens local health systems,” the authors write.

And there are signs of change in the energy sector.

“Zero-carbon sources accounted for 80% of investment in electricity generation in 2021, and renewable energies have reached cost parity with fossil fuel energies,” according to the report. “As some of the highest emitting countries attempt to cut their dependence on oil and gas in response to the war in Ukraine and soaring energy prices, many are focusing on increasing renewable energy generation, raising hopes for a health-centered response. However, increased awareness and commitments should be urgently translated into action for hope to turn into reality.”

There’s also more media coverage than ever on the link between climate change and health. The new Lancet report finds in 2021, global newspaper coverage — in print and online — of both climate change and health reached a new record high, with 14,474 articles, 27% more than in 2020.

In 51 English-language newspapers across 24 countries, 20% of 13,017 articles referring to both health and climate change also referred to adaptation measures, and 48% referred to the pandemic. Only 5% referred to health, climate change, adaptation, and the pandemic, according to the report.

Advice for journalists

Climate change affects people’s health and it’s an angle journalists can pursue to engage their readers.

During the APHA briefing, DeJarnett advised journalists to more frequently discuss that angle. “When there is coverage on extreme heat, air quality, wildfires, extreme weather, flooding, drought, etc., I would love to see them highlight the physical and mental health connections,” she said.

In a webinar on Nov. 15, Peter Prengaman, AP’s Global Climate and Environmental News Director, gave journalists three pieces of advice for covering climate change: Don’t be intimidated; think about what is happening in your community — sources of energy, preservation efforts, high electric car sales — and try to connect those things to the larger climate and environment stories; and make your stories about people.

“Start with what people know,” Salas advised in a 2021 interview with The Journalist’s Resource. “I’ve had patients say, ‘My allergies are just so much worse over the past few years,’ or, ‘I just really had a lot more trouble getting my asthma under control,’ or, ‘It’s been so hot I can’t actually go out and run and do the things I want to do.’ I can guarantee that there are multiple ways that climate change is harming health in every region of the U.S. Start there and lead the readers on that path to say here’s what’s happening here.”

Resources

• At The Journalist’s Resource, we have dozens of tip sheets, research roundups and explainers on various aspects of climate change. 

• Covering Climate Now, an initiative co-founded in 2019 by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in association with The Guardian and WNYC, collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories, to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom. The organization also offers best practices for climate reporting.

• Harvard T.H. Chan’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE), provides research, fact sheets and visuals on climate and health.

• “What journalists need to know when covering climate change” is a succinct tip sheet by NPR Climate Team to help journalists explain the impact of climate change on our lives. 

• Climate Central is an independent organization of leading scientists and journalists researching and reporting the facts about our changing climate and its impact on the public.

• World Weather Attribution, an international collaboration provides robust assessments on the role of climate change in the aftermath of extreme weather or climate-related events. 

• CDC’s Climate and Health Program works with various communities to identify climate change’s impact and the potential related health effects. 

• CDC’s Heat & Health Tracker provides local heat and health information so communities can better prepare for and respond to extreme heat events.

• Climate Reporting Masterclass, a project of Climate Matters in the Newsroom, features climate experts providing journalists with tools, tips and resources for their reporting. 

• Climate Communication is a nonprofit science and outreach website and information resource, and a project of Aspen Global Change Institute, a nonprofit institute dedicated to furthering the scientific understanding of Earth systems and global environmental change.

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With extreme drought in the Western U.S. causing water levels in the Colorado River to fall to historic lows and the Northeast also experiencing an extraordinarily dry summer, it’s a good time to explore recent research about electric vehicles — long touted as a key way to turn back the clock on climate change.

Carbon emissions increase the likelihood of extreme weather events, such as drought and wildfires. Electric vehicles “have large potential to reduce land-based transport [greenhouse gas] emissions,” according to a 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific analysis organization headquartered in Geneva and endorsed by the United Nations.

The first electric cars date to the 1830s, though they weren’t ready for everyday use until the 1870s. By the early 1900s, electric vehicles made up one-third of all vehicles in America, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The rise of Henry Ford’s gas-fueled Model T in the early 1910s spelled an end to the electric car for decades. The 1970s oil crisis renewed interest in electric vehicles. In 1996 General Motors released the EV1, a mass-produced all-electric car. In 2000 Toyota announced the U.S. launch of its Prius, the first mass produced hybrid vehicle, running on both gas and electric power. Tesla began delivering its first electric car, a sports car called the Roadster, in 2009, followed by the Model S luxury sedan in 2012.

Electric vehicles make up a small fraction of the roughly 261 million light-duty vehicles, including motorcycles, on U.S. roads. The Environmental Protection Agency defines light-duty vehicles as those weighing less than 8,500 pounds. Most passenger cars, SUVs, motorcycles and pickup trucks are considered light duty. Passenger cars and light-duty trucks account for 68% of U.S. road vehicle emissions and the transportation sector as a whole is the biggest greenhouse gas polluter, according to the latest federal government data.

There were about 2 million registered hybrid and fully electric vehicles in the U.S. in 2021, according to a 2022 report from the International Energy Agency, an independent intergovernmental organization based in Paris. “Some of the main drivers underpinning growth in the United States in 2021 were the increased production of Tesla models and the availability of new generation electric models by incumbent automakers,” according to the report. Combined sales of fully and partially electric vehicles doubled from 295,000 in 2020 to 631,000 last year — representing 5% of new vehicle sales, according to the agency.

Globally, hybrid and fully electric vehicles make up less than 1% of the 1.3 billion light-duty vehicles on the road today, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which collects and publishes energy statistics and analysis. The administration projects that by 2050, there will be 672 million plug-in vehicles around the world, making up about one-third of the global vehicle fleet.

One barrier to widespread electric vehicle adoption is fleet turnover, which simply means new vehicles replacing old ones. New gas-powered cars can last years, even decades, before they are replaced by lower- or no-emissions vehicles. As the authors of one of the papers included below write, “even if [electric vehicle] market share jumped dramatically, it would take decades to replace the existing vehicle fleet, during which time vehicle [greenhouse gas] emissions would continue, worsening climate change.”

To reduce electric vehicle costs and speed production, the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law on Aug. 16, provides tax credits to battery makers, potentially bringing down battery production costs by about one-third. Some states are also attempting to accelerate fleet turnover through policy action. California, for example, by 2035 will ban sales of new cars that run solely on gasoline.

The five studies featured here explore innovative ways to spur electric vehicle purchases, such as a revamped cash-for-clunkers program, which originally made national headlines in the U.S. during the Great Recession. Other topics include overviews of current charging infrastructure needs, considerations related to social and economic inequality, and the prospect of reusing car batteries to store solar power.

Inequality and the Future of Electric Mobility in 36 U.S. Cities: An Innovative Methodology and Comparative Assessment
Patricia Romero-Lankao, Alana Wilson and Daniel Zimny-Schmitt. Energy Research & Social Science, September 2022.

The study: The authors explore social and economic inequalities in 36 U.S. cities, then discuss how those inequities can inform the rollout of transportation technologies, such as electric vehicles, so the broadest number of people can take advantage of them. They specifically explore how inequities play out for “wealthy, urban disadvantaged, urban renters, middle-class homeowners, and rural/exurban” groups.

The findings: The authors focus on 20 large metropolitan areas — each with a population of more than 1.5 million people — and 16 medium metropolitan areas — each with 500,000 to 1.5 million people — in California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and the District of Columbia. They conclude that in order for electric vehicle rollouts to be successful, government policies will need to be tailored to the specific needs of each group. “For instance, rural/exurban populations might require electric carpooling,” the authors write. City dwellers, however, especially renters and households with lower incomes, would benefit more from electrified transit options rather than individually owned electric vehicles.

In the authors’ words: “Offering a variety of electrified options would provide benefits to the largest percentage of people and have more potential to sustainably decrease greenhouse gas emissions, reduce tailpipe emissions, and improve the health of people and ecosystems.”

Accelerating Vehicle Fleet Turnover to Achieve Sustainable Mobility Goals
Sergey Naumov, David Keith and John Sterman. Journal of Operations Management, March 2022.

The study: The authors examine potential designs for cash-for-clunkers programs that would help turn over more of the nation’s vehicle fleet to low- or no-emissions vehicles. The most notable cash-for-clunkers program in the U.S., called the Car Allowance Rebate System, ran during the summer of 2009 with $3 billion in congressional allocations. People with eligible gas-guzzling cars received a credit to purchase newer, more fuel efficient vehicles. Engines in the old cars were disabled and the cars scrapped. The authors use a model of light duty vehicle turnover in the U.S., developed as part of prior research from two of the authors, and simulate cash-for-clunkers policies that would achieve significant vehicle turnover by 2050.  

The findings: Despite thousands of dollars in existing tax credits at the federal level and in some states for people buying zero-emissions vehicles, “alternative fuel vehicles have only achieved low single-digit market share in the United States to date,” the authors write. Their model assumes that patterns of car turnover will remain largely the same in the coming decades — with the average light vehicle having a useful life of 17 to 30 years — though they acknowledge that technological advances, like self-driving cars, could change those patterns. They explore several different program designs, including those in which people can get a cash credit for the purchase of an electric vehicle or traditional combustion engine vehicle; an electric or hybrid; or electric only. The authors find the design that would work best at turning over the existing vehicle fleet and reducing emissions is one that makes all gas-powered vehicles eligible, regardless of their age or fuel efficiency, and the credit reserved for those who replace their old car with a fully electric one. Government vehicle fleets being made fully electric would further spur the no-emissions vehicle market, they add.

In the authors’ words: “[Cash-for-clunkers] programs will also primarily benefit more affluent individuals who buy the majority of new cars, while low-income individuals tend to purchase used vehicles or forgo car ownership altogether, instead relying on public transportation. However, by accelerating fleet turnover, [cash-for-clunkers] policies speed reductions in harmful tailpipe emissions. The adverse health impacts of these emissions are disproportionately borne by the poor and especially by people of color.”

The State of Play in Electric Vehicle Charging Services — A Review of Infrastructure Provision, Players, and Policies
Sarah LaMonaca and Lisa Ryan. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, February 2022.

The study: The authors explore current charging options for electric vehicle owners and policies that could spur the development of more charging infrastructure. They also discuss whether charging infrastructure is “a public good or private asset,” considering that “both the public and private sectors have been involved in the provision of charging stations and it is timely to consider the roles of the different actors in this market.”

The findings: Charging services have different cost structures, which make it hard for consumers to compare whether it’s cheaper to charge at home or at a public charging station. Some charging services charge by the minute, the hour, by energy used, or even offer subscriptions. The authors suggest that legislation could standardize how charging pricing is presented and “could help to improve the customer experience when searching out charging services.” To promote electric vehicle usage, federal and state governments could subsidize charging infrastructure, which is still expensive to build and maintain. Better data is needed on how and when people use public chargers, which federal or state governments could compel private providers to make public.

In the authors’ words: “Because the likely social benefits are not limited to those who can pay, decisions about this infrastructure are an important public policy concern and should not be just a matter for private firms and investors; it is therefore rarely fully privately-funded or owned.”

Quantifying the Emissions Impact of Repurposed Electric Vehicle Battery Packs in Residential Settings
Alizer Khowaja, Matthew Dean and Kara Kockelman. Journal of Energy Storage, November 2021.

The study: The authors use detailed electrical grid generation data and electricity demand data from homes with solar power in Austin, Texas, to explore the potential emissions benefits of adding the storage power of old electric vehicle batteries to energy efficient homes. Based on previous environmental research, the authors note that drawbacks crop up throughout the life of an electric vehicle battery, including “the depletion of water tables during mining, high [greenhouse gas] emissions during battery manufacturing, e-waste due to a small percentage of batteries being recycled after operation, and contamination or exposure of toxic chemicals after disposal.”

The findings: Used electric vehicle batteries can hold from 60% to 80% of their original capacity, “which under favorable conditions could provide up to 10 years of second-life stationary [battery storage systems] at an economic savings of up to 60% compared to new storage systems,” the authors write. Assuming processes are in place to distribute and install old electric vehicle batteries to store solar power for homes, the authors find that such setups could reduce carbon emissions by one ton each year for each equipped house. By comparison, the average car emits roughly 4.6 tons of carbon per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the authors’ words: “While the [greenhouse gas] savings for each household may appear negligible, the power of scale and rising social cost of CO2 may allow communities to considerably reduce their carbon footprint and transition both the power and transportation sector away from traditional fuel sources.”

There’s No Place like Home: Residential Parking, Electrical Access, and Implications for the Future of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure
Yanbo Ge, Christina Simeone, Andrew Duvall, and Eric Wood. National Renewable Energy Laboratory Technical Report, October 2021.

The report: The authors examine the types of homes that currently have charging access, noting that “there is uncertainty about how effectively home charging can scale as the primary charging location for electric vehicle owners.” They conducted an online survey from May 13 to May 31, 2020, asking 5,250 adults across the U.S. about their access to parking and electrical outlets. The authors use the survey results to project what the future of charging infrastructure might look like.

The findings: The authors find that one quarter of those surveyed have driveways or garages with electrical access, with another quarter reporting they could have such access installed. In one future scenario, the authors project that if every car on the road were electric, about one quarter of vehicles would lack at-home charging. They note that for electric vehicle ownership to extend beyond “high-income, single-family homes that have access to off-street parking,” city planners will need to consider how to provide charging infrastructure for people living in multi-family housing, such as apartment buildings, where overnight, off-street parking may not be easily available.

In the authors’ words: “In situations where residential off-street charging access is unattainable, a portfolio of solutions may be possible, including providing access to public charging in residential neighborhoods (on street), at workplaces, at commonly visited public locations, and (when necessary) at centralized locations via high power fast charging infrastructure (similar to existing gas stations).”

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If newsrooms want climate science skeptics to read and share news about climate change, researcher Renita Coleman recommends they do this: Leave the terms “climate change” and “global warming” out of their coverage.

“Research seems to indicate those are trigger words for skeptics,” says Coleman, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “This is what we found would trigger them to stop reading and instantly become hostile, [believing] ‘Oh, that story is biased or that media organization is biased.’”

Coleman is the lead author of a new paper that investigates strategies to help journalists reach people who distrust science. She and her colleagues conducted an experiment that indicates small changes in how journalists cover climate change have the potential to elicit substantial changes in the way skeptics engage with the news.

In the experiment, after reading a news story that incorporated the three changes below, skeptics said they would likely seek out and share more news about climate change. They also said they would likely take steps to help mitigate its damage.  

• Replacing “climate change” and “global warming” with the word “weather.”
• Avoiding mentioning who or what causes climate change.
• Focusing heavily on solutions, or what the public can do to prepare for or adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Coleman says she’s not suggesting journalists take this approach with all climate change stories. But they should consider doing it with some, she and her coauthors explain in “Reaching Science Skeptics: How Adaptive Framing of Climate Change Leads to Positive Responses Via Persuasion Knowledge and Perceived Behavioral Control, published May 19 in Communication Research.

The other researchers who worked on the study are Esther Thorson, a journalism professor at Michigan State University, and Cinthia Jimenez and Kami Vinton, two doctoral students at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It’s not a violation of ethics by any means to not say anything about what causes climate change,” explains Coleman, who, prior to entering academia, worked 15 years as a reporter, editor and designer at newspapers and magazines in Florida and North Carolina. “Every story has things that are left out, right? Leave this out occasionally. Not all the time — occasionally.”

By making these changes, journalists might encourage many more people to read and share their work, she says.

“It’s important to reach these people we’re not reaching,” she continues. “We’re not going to turn people who don’t believe climate change is man-made into believing. But we can get them to want to read more information and talk to other people about it versus shutting down.”

To study the issue, Coleman and her fellow researchers recruited a sample of 1,200 U.S. adults and asked them to read a news article about climate change and then answer a series of questions. They made sure about half the people who participated were climate science skeptics.

The sample included individuals from various demographic backgrounds. Three-fourths were white, 13.1% were Black, 4.3% were Hispanic, 1.5% were Asian and 2.8% identified as “other.” In terms of education, 43% had a high school education or less, 30% completed some college, 16% had a bachelor’s degree and 11% had taken graduate-level courses or obtained a graduate degree.

The sample also represented different political ideologies. Almost 37% of participants identified as Democrats, 26.8% were Republican and 36.7% reported being Independents.

The authors recruited participants using Qualtrics, an organization that maintains a pool of people representing various demographic backgrounds who have agreed to complete online surveys. The researchers collected response data from Sept. 23, 2019 to Oct. 2, 2019.

For the experiment, Coleman created four news stories about climate change based on actual news coverage. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of them.

Two of the stories focused on high temperatures in Missouri. Two reported on ocean flooding in Orange County, California. Each story pair was visually similar — for example, the articles ran a page long, lacked photographs and purportedly came from The Associated Press. But they differed in terms of framing and word choices. One article in each pair blamed climate change and global warming while the other avoided those terms and emphasized solutions such as preparing for changes in weather and sea levels.

The headlines for each pair were worded differently:

Pair 1

Man-made global warming pushing ocean waters higher, experts say

Experts: Orange County towns must speed adaptation strategies for ocean’s encroachment

Pair 2

With drought and heat waves ahead, Missouri grapples with impact of man-made climate change

Adaptation on the agenda as Missouri grapples with hotter future

After reading their assigned article, participants responded to online questions about the article and their responses to it. One question, for example, asked participants to rate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I was annoyed by the story because it seems to be trying to influence the audience” and “With this story’s approach people can do something to stop damage from [the issue featured in the story].”

Another question asked participants about the likelihood they would take these future actions:

• “Endorse spending taxpayer money to address these issues in the ways described in this story.”
• “Vote for elected officials who support this kind of planning.”
• “Support efforts the story described to handle [the problem featured].”

After analyzing responses, the researchers realized that the framing and language of the news article did make a difference. “Removing any references to what causes climate change reduced perceptions that the news stories were trying to manipulate or persuade readers,” they write.

They add that “removing any references to causes of climate change and emphasizing the ability to adapt increased the extent to which people considered themselves efficacious, responding more positively to ideas about working together to protect us all and stop damage, and that plans to adapt can work.”

The authors also note the importance of “emphasizing the word ‘adapt’ and its derivatives, which implies adjusting, modifying, mitigating, and revising — all incremental changes that are easier to accomplish than fundamental, transformational change.”

Other scholars have pointed out that the language journalists use — and the repetition of certain words and phrases — can influence audiences’ interpretation of issues. Dietram Scheufele, the Taylor-Bascom Chair in Science Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a 2019 interview with The Journalist’s Resource that “journalists have to be very careful, in terms of endorsing one term or the other.”

Scheufele explained that in 2014, White House science adviser John Holdren pushed for a new term to describe the impact that rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are having on the planet. Holden had argued “global climate disruption” captures the phenomena more accurately than do “global warming” and “climate change.”

Coleman and her colleagues’ work builds on earlier research that suggests avoiding the term “climate change” may help generate support for sending humanitarian aid to areas hit by natural disasters. Climate science skeptics who participated in that experiment “reported greater justifications for not helping the victims when the disaster was attributed to climate change,” according to the paper, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science in 2016.

Coleman, Thorson, Jimenez and Vinton note their study has several limitations. A big one: Their experiment involved only two story pairs.

“Climate change has many specific issues and future studies should create and test more stories on different climate topics,” they write.

Also, their findings apply only to the sample of people who participated, not the U.S. public as a whole.

Even so, Coleman says, the findings offer important insights into how science skeptics engage with and interpret news coverage of climate change. Future research, she adds, could look at how skeptics respond to changes in the framing and language of stories about other contested topics.

Coleman and her colleagues have experimented with similar changes to news articles about vaccines and found that vaccine skeptics responded to the changes in ways similar to how climate science skeptics responded to changes in climate change coverage. The researchers presented their findings at a conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 2020.

As scholars continue investigating these issues, Coleman urges news outlets to consider what they might be doing to create a perception among some groups that they are trying to push their audiences to take a certain stance on an issue. Not everyone realizes how journalists do their work, she adds.

“We are not [public relations] and we are not advertising, but that’s not something people always get,” she notes. “We need to think a little more nuanced, if you will, about what kinds of things we are doing to make people think we are trying to persuade them when we know we are not.”

If you’re looking for more help covering climate change, please check out our tip sheet on what journalists get wrong and how to get it right and our tip sheet on reporting on extreme weather.

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With tornado season in the U.S. ramping up over the coming months, a recent study provides critical insight on the costs, both economic and social, of those storms — and how they can exacerbate racial segregation.

Tornadoes are more likely to damage and destroy homes, buildings and other property in counties with relatively larger Black populations, according to “Tornadoes, Poverty and Race in the USA: A Five-Decade Analysis,” published last December in the Journal of Economic Studies. That finding holds true for urban and rural counties.

In counties where tornadoes hit, the authors find the overall proportion of Black people and the proportion of people living in poverty are both slightly higher, while median income and the proportion of people with at least a bachelor’s degree are lower.

Crucially, the authors find that tornadoes can exacerbate racial segregation through two avenues: abandonment or displacement.

Abandonment — when people leave their damaged homes and resettle elsewhere — is more likely in wealthier counties. Those with the financial resources to move are likelier to be white, increasing “the prevalence of poor African Americans in those communities,” the authors write.

Displacement, meanwhile, happens when access to resources, such as homeowners’ insurance, gives some people the ability to rebuild. Lower-income Black populations are more likely to be renters and lack the financial resources to rebuild in places where tornadoes hit, making them more likely than white people to be displaced from their homes. When Black people are displaced, the population of the area hit by a tornado becomes whiter and poverty rates drop, the authors find.

“There are areas where upper middle-class whites abandoned and there are areas where upper middle-class whites rebuild — or, more likely, see buying opportunities and increase their population,” says co-author Russ Kashian, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

At the end of 2021, the home ownership rate for white people nationwide was 74%, compared with 43% for Black people, according to the Census Bureau. And there is evidence of race discrimination in insurance company payout decisions for homeowners following disasters, according to reporting from the New York Times and a May 2020 working paper from researchers at St. John’s University.

Abandonment is more likely in heavily populated areas, with displacement more common in rural areas, the authors of the current study find. Counties where people were largely displaced had an average population of 38,523. Counties where people largely abandoned their homes had an average population of 286,448.

“People with the means either do well because they’ve been able to mitigate and recover, or they leave,” says co-author Tracy Buchman, an assistant professor of occupational and environmental safety at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater who co-wrote the paper with Kashian and Robert Drago, a researcher at Precision Numerics in Springfield, Mass. “People without means end up backfilling because stuff is inexpensive now [in a devastated area], or they didn’t do well and they’re still living in an area that’s vulnerable to multiple strikes of tornado and the damage that goes with it.”

When tornadoes strike relatively wealthy counties, damages tend to be more expensive. The authors explain in the paper that although a tornado is more likely to devastate a mobile home than a brick home with a foundation, it is likewise “more expensive to replace a late-model sports car than a decade-old Ford sedan.”

“In a nutshell, the vulnerable are more likely to experience losses, the wealthy have more to lose,” says Kashian.

Consequences of extreme weather

Roughly 1,000 to 1,500 tornadoes touch down in the U.S. each year. In 2021, there were nearly 1,400 tornadoes, according to preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center.

Tornadoes can happen anywhere but are most common in “the central plains of North America, east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Appalachian Mountains,” according to NOAA, with spring and summer the most likely seasons for tornado touchdowns.

The Journal of Economic Studies paper adds insight into the economic and social consequences of severe weather. While climate change is one factor that can contribute to extreme weather, it isn’t settled science as to whether global warming correlates to more severe or more frequent tornadoes.

By contrast, hurricanes have been linked to climate change, with global warming likely to cause more severe hurricanes over the next century, according to ongoing analyses from Tom Knutson, senior scientist at NOAA.

It is difficult for meteorologists to track trends and make projections for tornadoes and thunderstorms, since they can pass quickly and often affect relatively small land areas.

Still, the Fourth National Climate Assessment from the U.S. Global Change Research Program offers that compared with “damages from other types of extreme weather, those occurring due to thunderstorm-related weather hazards have increased the most since 1980, and there is some indication that, in a warmer world, the number of days with conditions conducive to severe thunderstorm activity is likely to increase.”

Tornado intensity, damages and relief

Tornado intensity is classified along the Enhanced Fujita Scale, named for Theodore Fujita, the 20^th century meteorologist who developed it. After a tornado hits, the National Weather Service deploys a survey team to assess damage, estimate wind speeds and give the tornado an EF rating.

The least severe tornado rating — EF0 — indicates gusts between 65 mph and 85 mph.

The most severe — EF5 — indicates gusts over 200 mph.

While the recent study finds fewer tornadoes, on average, per decade since the 1970s, the cost of damages has risen substantially. During the 2010s, each tornado measuring at least an EF2 caused an average of $666,668 in inflation-adjusted damages, according to the paper. That’s up from a low of $49,492 in the 1990s and $131,976 in the 1970s.

The authors’ figures on economic damages include nearly 11,000 tornadoes covering five decades beginning in 1970. They exclude 93 outlier tornadoes with damages above $15.5 million “because we suspect that these events are both more well-publicized and receive greater attention in terms of public and private recovery efforts,” they write. Tornado location and economic damage estimates come from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters out of Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency distributes federal aid dollars following natural disasters. Other major sources of funding for immediate relief and rebuilding include private insurance and local and national nonprofits. Kashian says one takeaway is that the funds FEMA does provide could be more equitably distributed.

“What we need to say is, ‘Who needs the money?’” he says. “And, ‘What areas need investment?’ And invest in such a way that it retains the character of the neighborhood prior to the event.” 

In addition to equitable distribution, it’s an open question as to whether in the years ahead there will be a sufficient volume of federal disaster aid. A 2021 investigation from Washington Post reporters Hannah Dreier and Andrew Ba Tran exposed a system that denied disaster aid to longstanding Black families in the South, and found that overall approval rates for FEMA aid requests fell from 63% in 2010 to 13% in 2021.

Dreier and Tran report that more than one-third of the land that Black people in the South own “is passed down informally, rather than through deeds and wills.” In September 2021, FEMA announced “that it will no longer require disaster survivors living on inherited land to prove they own their homes before they can get help rebuilding,” the journalists write.

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For the past six years, the Lancet medical journal has been publishing an in-depth annual report tracking the impact of climate change on health around the world.

The annual reports, titled Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, stand out in that they lay bare the connection between climate change and health, and shed light on the disproportionate impact of a warming climate on vulnerable countries and populations.

This year’s report, “The 2021 report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Code Red for a Healthy Future,” published on Oct. 20, shows that in every region of the world, the impact of a warming climate on human health is getting worse compared with previous years and that climate change is further exacerbating health inequities.

It also finds that most countries are not doing enough to slow climate change. Many countries remain unprepared for public health or climate-related emergencies, the report adds. 

“During a 6 month period in 2020, 84 disasters from floods, droughts, and storms affected 51.6 million people in countries already struggling with COVID-19, with the escalating impacts of disasters reducing their ability to respond to health emergencies,” the authors write. 

The Lancet has produced the reports since 2016. The 2021 report builds on the previous five, documenting little to no progress by most countries to curb climate change and that health and inequity gaps continue to widen. It sends a clearer and stronger message than before that collective human health is in danger if countries don’t do their part to slow climate change.

“Although the world economy and health systems are recovering from a substantial acute global health crisis, climate change poses a much greater health threat in the coming decades,” the authors write.

Even for journalists who don’t typically cover climate change, the reports are a treasure trove of story ideas that can help readers, listeners and viewers understand how extreme weather events, including droughts, wildfires and heat waves, affect personal health. 

“Climate change is a health crisis first and foremost and we really have to put health equity as not only the motivation to act, but also have that drive our response,” says co-author Dr. Renee Salas, a Yerby Fellow at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an emergency physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “As a doctor I can think of no better prescription for improving health inequity than action on climate change.”

While the main report takes a global look at climate change and health, the Lancet also publishes companion policy briefs for several countries, including the United States. 

Salas was the lead author for this year’s U.S. policy brief. It explores the impact of extreme heat, droughts and wildfires, which could have broad and far-reaching impacts on health, and offers policy recommendations. 

The Lancet global reports are written by an international consortium of more than 100 researchers from 43 institutions and United Nation agencies. The researchers include climate scientists, economists, energy and transport experts, social and political scientists, public health experts and front-line health professionals. 

The 2021 Lancet report was released just before the United Nations’ global warming conference, Framework Convention on Climate Change 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), scheduled from Oct. 31 to Nov. 21 in Glasgow, Scotland. 

“About 20,000 heads of state, diplomats and activists are expected to meet in person starting Oct. 31 to set new targets for cutting emissions from burning coal, oil and gas that are heating the planet,” explains Lisa Friedman in an Oct. 19 story in The New York Times. “The conference is held annually but this year is critical because scientists say nations must make an immediate, sharp pivot away from fossil fuels if they hope to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.”

While national and global reports talk about the big picture, journalists can zoom in on their local community and find out what aspects of climate change are impacting people’s health. Is it wildfires, drought, more intense hurricanes or more days of extreme heat? 

“Start with what people know,” says Salas. “I’ve had patients say, ‘My allergies are just so much worse over the past few years,’ or, ‘I just really had a lot more trouble getting my asthma under control,’ or, ‘It’s been so hot I can’t actually go out and run and do the things I want to do.’ I can guarantee that there are multiple ways that climate change is harming health in every region of the U.S. Start there and lead the readers on that path to say here’s what’s happening here.” 

The 2021 Lancet Countdown report is filled with information and details. Here are seven tips to help you localize the report.

1. Explain how extreme weather affects human health

“There’s nothing obviously more personal than health and I think that we as a society have never before realized as we do now about how integral health is to a healthy functioning society and the pandemic has clearly shown us that,” says Salas, who is one of 100 new members elected to the National Academy of Medicine in October. 

Climate change affects human health by increasing exposure to extreme weather events, increasing the transmission of infectious diseases, changing human migration patterns and affecting people’s livelihood and mental health, the report explains. 

Droughts, for instance, increase the risk of respiratory and infectious diseases, worsen water quality and exacerbate mental health issues, particularly in rural areas, explains the Countdown’s U.S. policy brief. Heat waves, like the one that swept across the Pacific Northwest in June, can lead to death and pose health risks to mothers and babies. Wildfire smoke has been associated with increased risk of heart and lung disease and greater risk of preterm birth. 

Extreme heat, which is defined as summertime temperatures much hotter than average, poses health dangers individuals, particularly to babies younger than 1 and people older than 65, people living in urban areas and people with health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and respiratory disease. It also affects those with little access to health care and cooling systems, underscoring inequities.

2. Talk to local emergency room doctors and other health care providers

When someone comes in with an asthma attack, Salas looks for underlying drivers, which can be other medical conditions or the environment, like pollen count.

“Climate change is a diagnosis,” says Salas.

A February article in PNAS finds that human-caused climate change has already worsened the pollen seasons in the U.S., and the trends are likely to further exacerbate respiratory health impacts in coming decades. For her patients with asthma attacks, “climate change is a secondary diagnosis,” Salas says.

“I think of it as a river parable, where I’m in the emergency department, pulling patients one at a time from the river, and of course, there’s always more, but really the way to truly get to the root cause is to actually work upstream and figure out what’s causing patients to fall in the river in the first place,” says Salas. “That means we need to walk upstream and recognize that the burning of fossil fuels is driving air pollution and climate change, both of which are harming my patients in a multitude of ways.”

The Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health is a good source of medical experts on climate change by state. 

3. Check state and federal health databases to find trends in infections

Warmer weather is making the environment more favorable for transmission of mosquito-borne infections like Zika and chikungunya. Coastal waters have become more suitable for transmission of Vibrio bacteria, which can cause gastrointestinal infections, life-threatening cholera and severe wound infections. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks heat-related illnesses, including emergency department visits, hospitalizations and deaths. Find out if your local hospitals are willing to share trends data for heat-related illnesses, or the data is available at the state health department. 

The CDC’s ArboNET is the national arboviral surveillance system, managed by CDC and state health departments, which is searchable by state.

In addition to human disease, ArboNET maintains data on arboviral infections among veterinary disease cases, mosquitoes, dead birds, and sentinel animals, which are animals that are put in an environment to find out if an infectious disease is present. Arboviral infection is a general term used for diseases caused by viruses that are spread by insects such as mosquitoes and ticks. 

4. Shed light on climate change’s impact on vulnerable populations

In 2020, adults over the age of 65 lived through a total of nearly 300 million more days of heatwave in the U.S. compared with the 1986-2005 average baseline, making it the second highest year of exposure recorded since 1986, according to Countdown’s U.S. policy brief. Infants under one year experienced a total of nearly 22 million more days of heatwave in 2020 with respect to that same baseline.

The U.S. policy brief also notes that across the majority of states, exposure to air pollution is higher for Black, Latino, Alaskan Native or American Indian, Asian American or Pacific Islander and other people of color, even when controlling for income, in nearly every emissions category in rural and urban areas. 

“Decades of racially-biased policies — both implicit and explicit — including structural discrimination in housing, zoning, and the placement of industrial and transportation infrastructure have resulted in widespread and persistent air pollution inequities,” the authors write. 

5. Report on your local and state climate change and extreme weather plans

Climate change is making weather events extreme. It’s making winter storms and hurricanes more powerful.

“We’re going to see more of those things affecting local communities in ways that they’ve never experienced before,” says Ian Hamilton, executive director for Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change and Professor of Energy, Environment and Health at University College London Energy Institute. “Flooding in West of England can disrupt ambulatory care services because they can’t get people to hospitals.” 

Ask officials at your city and local hospitals how they are preparing for extreme weather. Explain to your audience that their government is responsible for taking action to slow climate change. 

“Recognize that actually your government and those large corporations who are going to be major contributors to this issue, have to take responsibility and act in our best interest,” says Hamilton. “But then, yes, we as individuals can begin to take actions,” by taking steps like reducing our carbon footprint.

6. Dig into the report’s climate change indicators for story ideas

The Countdown on Health and Climate Change report tracks 44 health indicators, which assess various issues, ranging from heat-related deaths, drought, city-level planning, benefits and harms of air conditioning, urban green spaces, economy and media coverage of health and climate change. 

The indicators are broken into five sections:

• Climate change impacts, exposures and vulnerability: The indicators in this section look at the connection between health and heat, extreme weather events, infectious diseases, food insecurity and displacement and migration. It also underscores the fact that even though the health impacts of climate change are felt across the world, they disproportionately affect disadvantaged populations.
• Adaptation, planning and resilience for health: This section assesses the capacity of governments and health systems to handle health emergencies, providing climate information to the health sector and the level of climate change funding dedicated to health systems. “A key theme across all the indicators is inequity and, although these indicators mostly track inequities between countries, within-country inequity is a substantial challenge in moving towards resilience and sustainability,” the authors write.
• Mitigation actions and health benefits: The indicators in this section assess the relationship between health and energy systems such as clean household energy, air pollution, transportation, food and agriculture, and emissions from the health care sector. The carbon intensity of the globally energy system has been unchanged, the authors write, costing millions of lives.
• Economics and finance: This section’s indicators assess the economic impact of climate change and its mitigation, such as economic loss due to extreme heat events, cost of heat-related deaths, loss of earnings from heat-related labor capacity reduction, cost of the health impacts of air pollution and economics of transition to clean energy. “As governments begin to invest in recovery from COVID-19, there is a crucial window of opportunity to reduce fossil fuel subsidies, invest more in clean energy, and support a green recovery,” the authors write.
• Public and political engagement: The final section of the report assesses engagement in health and climate change by the media, the public, scientific journals, governments and corporate sector. It concludes that health and climate change are increasingly addressed together and that the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be a major driver of engagement in health and climate change in 2020. It also find social inequities in public, scientific and political engagement, with low-income countries having lower levels of media and science coverage of climate change and health.

7. Remind audiences that without action, climate change is going to have a worse impact on our health than it is having today

The Lancet Countdown report warns that without an adequate response, the health effects of climate change will worsen in the coming decades. 

“There’s no vaccine for climate change,” says Hamilton.

More resources

The 2021 Countdown report has data visualizations available online.

At The Journalist’s Resource, we have dozens of other tip sheets, research roundups and explainers on various aspects of climate change. 

Covering Climate Now was co-founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in association with The Guardian and WNYC in 2019 and collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories, to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom. The organization also offers best practices for climate reporting. 

Climate Central is an independent organization of leading scientists and journalists researching and reporting the facts about our changing climate and its impact on the public.

World Weather Attribution, an international collaboration provides robust assessments on the role of climate change in the aftermath of extreme weather or climate-related events. 

CDC’s Climate and Health Program works with various communities to identify climate change’s impact and the potential related health effects. 

CDC’s Heat & Health Tracker provides local heat and health information so communities can better prepare for and respond to extreme heat events.

Climate Reporting Masterclass, a project of Climate Matters in the Newsroom, features climate experts providing journalists with tools, tips and resources for their reporting. 

Climate Communication is a nonprofit science and outreach website and information resource, and a project of Aspen Global Change Institute, a nonprofit institute dedicated to furthering the scientific understanding of Earth systems and global environmental change.

“What journalists need to know when covering climate change” is a succinct tip sheet by NPR Climate Team to help journalists explain the impact of climate change on our lives. 

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Republicans resistant to accepting that global warming is real and caused by humans could be swayed by online videos featuring climate science facts delivered by trusted messengers, such as evangelicals and retired military personnel, suggests recent research in Nature Climate Change.

The researchers conducted a monthlong experiment delivering the online videos to Republicans, Democrats and independents in two competitive congressional districts. Republicans in particular showed large upticks in their understanding that global warming is real and could impact future generations. The videos were designed to reach skeptical Republicans, though some Democrats were also convinced by the videos.

Addressing climate change is a top concern for 10% of Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans, compared with 49% of Democrats or those who lean Democrat, according to a Pew Research survey of 13,749 U.S. adults taken in late April.

“Because ambitious and durable climate policies require bipartisan support, it is important to engage more Republicans,” write Matthew Goldberg, Abel Gustafson, Seth Rosenthal and Anthony Leiserowitz in the recent paper, “Shifting Republican Views on Climate Change through Targeted Advertising.”

They add: “Although shifting basic beliefs and attitudes about climate change does not always lead to changes in behaviors or policy support, educating people about basic climate realities is an important foundation for problem recognition and solution seeking.”

The power of trusted messengers

Controlled lab tests have indicated right-leaning Americans can be swayed on climate science with messaging that resonates with values typically associated with conservative politics, such as free market approaches to tackling climate change.

The current research is among the first to test such messaging in a real-world field experiment. The authors recruited 1,600 respondents in two competitive congressional districts: the 2^nd Congressional District in Missouri, near St. Louis, and the 7^th Congressional District in Georgia, near Atlanta.

“Groups that are mixed tend to be more persuadable because they’re more likely to be challenged on their views, or exposed to information not directly in line with what they already think,” says Goldberg, an associate research scientist with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Respondents were variously recruited by automated voice messages sent to their landlines, text messages to their cell phones and an online survey panel. The researchers’ goal was to reduce unknown biases that could arise from using a single recruitment method.

The researchers delivered videos from the New Climate Voices campaign to select respondents through Facebook, YouTube and banner advertisements across the web from July 19-August 20, 2019. The videos, which the researchers helped develop for this study, feature four messengers delivering climate information targeted to convince Republicans that the earth is warming and that warming is caused by humans:

• Katherine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian and political scientist at Texas Tech University.
• Ret. Air Force Gen. Ron Keys.
• Former U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina.
• Jerry Taylor, Republican and president of the Niskansen Center, a centrist think tank.

The videos reflect each messenger’s personal perspective and background. Keys, for example, talks about how climate change is a threat to national security.

“Why does the military care about climate change?” he says in one video. “The answer is, we see it as a threat to our country. We have at least 19 bases around the world affected by rising sea levels.”

After the campaign, the researchers found 40% of Republicans exposed to the videos said global warming is real compared with 33% of Republicans who didn’t see the videos. Likewise, 29% of Republicans who saw the videos think global warming is caused by humans, compared with 19% of those not exposed to the videos. And 41% of Republicans who saw the videos think global warming will harm future generations, compared with 25% of those who did not see the videos.

“The big, overarching question — or the potential sense of uncertainty — is the translation from the lab into the field,” Goldberg says. “When people see these advertisements on their Facebook feeds it’s nested in everything else they see, which could easily contradict it. So the fact that this could be effective in that environment is really encouraging.”

The researchers’ hypothesis that trusted messengers can sway opinion on climate change stems from something called social identity theory. The idea is that people align with particular social and cultural groups based on shared beliefs — it’s about where individuals see their place in society. Drawing on personal experience and upbringing, an individual might think of themselves as some combination of urban, rural, conservative, liberal, evangelical or atheist, as just a few examples.

Credible messengers have a better shot at changing minds — and credibility often stems from expertise.

For example, someone who identifies as a strong supporter of the armed forces would likely be more open to a climate science message from an Air Force general with decades of military experience rather than from a newly enlisted airman, or someone who has never served.

Research methods — plus, how Democrats reacted

To conduct their study, the authors randomly assigned zip codes within the two congressional districts as either control or treatment zip codes. The New Climate Voices videos were delivered to the treatment zip codes, but not to the control zip codes. The researchers built treatment and control groups that were broadly similar in terms of age, sex and political leanings.

The researchers surveyed an initial 1,600 respondents from the treatment and control zip codes about their beliefs on global warming — before the advertisements were delivered. They conducted this pre-campaign survey to rule out factors other than the advertisements that might affect beliefs about climate change, such as whether there was already a general rising understanding that the accelerated pace of global warming has been driven by human activity since the Industrial Revolution.

After the month of advertisements, the researchers administered the same survey on global warming to a different group of 1,600 respondents: 800 received the ads, 800 did not. In total, there were 540 Republicans, 418 Democrats, 502 independents and 140 respondents who did not affiliate with a political ideology. The treatment group received an average of roughly seven videos during the campaign.

While the campaign was designed to inform Republicans — and Democrats started out with higher levels of belief in global warming — the researchers did observe increases of several percentage points among Democrats in two areas. Some 93% of Democrats who saw the videos said global warming is real, compared with 87% of those who did not see the videos. And while 85% of Democrats exposed to the videos think global warming is caused by humans, that figure was 76% among Democrats not exposed to the campaign.

Still, the overall results were driven by swayed Republicans, according to the paper. The research doesn’t capture how long the effects lasted or how the advertisements would play in heavily Republican congressional districts.

But, it provides evidence that credible messengers in real-world advertising can move the needle when it comes to belief in and concern about global warming, Goldberg says. The results indicate that climate change “isn’t something only extremely liberal folks care about,” he adds.

Additional reading

Messaging for Environmental Action: The Role of Moral Framing and Message Source
Kristin Hurt and Marc Stern. Journal of Environmental Psychology, April 2020.

Promoting Persuasion with Ideologically Tailored Science Messages: A Novel Approach to Research on Emphasis Framing
Kate Luong, R. Kelly Garrett and Michael Slater. Science Communication, July 2019.

What Predicts Selective Exposure Online: Testing Political Attitudes, Credibility, and Social Identity
Magdalena Wojcieszak. Communication Research, May 2019.

Improving Climate Change Acceptance among U.S. Conservatives through Value-Based Message Targeting
Graham Dixon, Jay Hmielowski and Yanni Ma. Science Communication, June 2017.

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