One of the main reasons for creating Cornell’s MPH Program was to help spur national conversations on the links between climate change and health. “The field as a whole just wasn’t doing this yet,” says Dr. Alexander Travis, the MPH Program’s director. To make this goal a reality, the MPH Program has made issues of environmental sustainability, particularly climate change and biodiversity loss, a central focus in its curriculum from day one. Cornell MPH students spend their first semester diving into complex public health topics through both social and environmental lenses, designing systems diagrams to understand these connections, and by the end of their first year, students can explain how the health of the environment intersects with the social determinants of health in a wide variety of contexts.

As an advisor in New York State’s Climate Impacts Assessment, and a member of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health’s (ASPPH) Climate Change and Health Task Force, Dr. Travis also participates in efforts to integrate climate change in statewide policy agendas and national public health education. “It’s wonderful to now see government and the world of public health recognize these crucial linkages, and a great honor for our MPH Program to take part in these conversations.”

Climate change affects health in myriad ways, says Dr. Travis. “It impacts everything—air quality, vector-borne diseases, the price of food, wildfires and flooding, harmful algal blooms—it even impacts our ability to educate,” he says. “Data show that many young people feel overwhelmed by climate change. This affects learning, and higher education bears the cost of providing mental health support.” There are also cases around the country where the basements of educational institutions and hospitals flood, destroying research and medical equipment, and infiltrating buildings with harmful molds. The basements of New York’s coastal institutions, he points out, could be full of vulnerable instruments and equipment that should be inventoried and protected. “These are critical issues, and the state is planning ahead,” says Dr. Travis.

As an advisor for the New York State Climate Impacts Assessment’s Technical Working Group on Society and Economy, Dr. Travis works alongside a variety of statewide stakeholders, including other Cornell faculty and the working group’s co-chair, Dr. Luis Aguirre-Torres, director of sustainability for the city of Ithaca. Together, these stakeholders assess how climate change will continue to impact the state. “At this point in the assessment,” says Dr. Aguirre-Torres, who was also the MPH Program’s 2021 graduation speaker, “it’s clear that non-climate stresses, such as economic inequality and uneven access to education, create a situation where climate change acts as a threat-multiplier, disproportionately affecting New York State’s most vulnerable residents.”

The ASPPH Climate Change and Health Task Force is another platform where Dr. Travis advocates for prioritizing the environment in public health education. The task force produced a 2022 report that recognizes that climate change is one of the greatest global challenges of this century, and recommends that the Council on Education for Public Health revise accreditation standards to ensure that all U.S. public health schools and programs teach students about the interconnections between climate change and health.

“Our trainees need to recognize the many different ways that climate change impacts health, from forces that influence human behavior, to the emergence of new human diseases, to the loss of soils and crops,” said Dr. Travis, speaking on a panel for the ASPPH 2022 Annual Meeting session Climate Change and Health: The Defining Issue of Our Time. “These impacts will be felt by every part of society.”

Written by Audrey Baker