EVENTS

The next Pacific RISCC  Webinar, “Climate Change Aggravates Over Half of Pathogenic Diseases”, will feature Dr. Tristan McKenzie, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

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McKenzie completed his PhD at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Geology and Geophysics in 2020 focusing on anthropogenic impacts to coastal water quality using geochemical tracers. His current work integrates geochemistry and artificial intelligence to answer multidisciplinary questions about human-induced stressors on environmental systems.

Numerous studies have documented the effect that climate change can have on human pathogenic diseases, but no previous study has fully quantified the full extent of the threat. We carried out a systematic search for explicit observations of ten different climatic hazards sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions affecting human disease. Our meta-analysis revealed 58% (218 out of 375) diseases are aggravated by climatic hazards through 1,006 transmission pathways. Atmospheric warming and vector-borne transmission were associated with enhancing the greatest number of diseases. This talk will include global results with case examples from the Pacific. Broadly, this work highlights the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.