Health -- The Human Face of Climate Change
In this week you'll meet the professors, get used to the edX environment, andreceive an overview of the pathways from climate change to human health outcomes. This week also includes a Climate Science Mini-Course for those who haven't studied the greenhouse effect or the effects of carbon dioxide before.
Heat & Air Quality
From here on, our coursewill be focused on answering a set of questions each week. This week: How does climate change affect heat-related illness? What does climate change have to do with air quality? What can be done to prevent heat exposure?
How does climate change impact water-borne diseases (like cholera and dysentery) and vector-borne diseases (such as malaria and dengue)? Will there be more outbreaks of water-borne diseases in a warming world? How will the range of disease vectors such as mosquitos and ticks shift with changes in temperature and rainfall?
Will we grow more crops or fewer in a hotter world? Will those crops be more nutritious, or less? What about the pests that feed on those crops? How will marine fisheries adapt to a warmer and more acidic ocean?
What happens when ambient temperatures exceed human tolerances? When storms, droughts and, extreme weather displace people - where do they go and what are the health consequences? What will happen to the inhabitants of small island states that will be wiped off the map by sea level rise?? What is it like to live as a climate refugee, both mentally and physically?
Climate change's impact on health can be gradual and progressive, emerging over years or even decades. How can one identify the relevant datasets to understand these emerging health impacts of climate change time series analysis? How can we address challenges of physical and temporal scale?
Responding to Climate Change
In our final week, we ask: What can nations, cities, and individuals do to respond to climate change? What are our options in terms of migration, adaptation, or even intervention? And given what we can do, what should we do?