Px: What Happens Next?
A prognosis asks where things are headed. It also asks what might change that course. Climate change will make the work of protecting health harder. What we do together can still influence how much harder it becomes.
The future we are worried about
In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge wants to know whether the future he is being shown must happen, or whether it can still be changed.
That is a useful question to bring to climate change.
The dangers are real. More warming brings greater risks and more difficult losses. Deep, sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions can limit future warming. The difference between those futures matters. IPCC's assessment of risks and responses
We don't need to pretend that all damage can be prevented in order to care about preventing more of it.
Public health will have more to do
One familiar prognosis is that climate change means more public health doing more public health.
We will need to anticipate local impacts, protect people through heat and smoke, prepare for emergencies, and help communities recover. Programs and rules designed for yesterday's conditions will need to work in a changing climate.
This is adaptation. It is essential work. We have to help people live as safely and well as possible in the conditions they face.
But I also want to ask whether we can help change the conditions they will face next.
We have things we can do
There are practical ways to reduce emissions across electricity, transportation, buildings, food, industry, and land use. Project Drawdown is one place to explore them. The range of possibilities is important: we have more to work with than a hope that someone will invent something someday.
That does not make implementation simple. Technical challenges remain, along with questions of cost, infrastructure, policy, power, and who gets to decide.
It does change the question. When we have useful interventions and people who care, what keeps us from putting those interventions into practice?
Public health knows that question. Helping populations make and sustain change is part of our work.
Hope and the ability to act
Our feelings about climate change move around. We can be hopeful and busy one day, overwhelmed the next. We can blame people who seem to be doing less, or wonder whether any of our own efforts matter.
It is also a privilege to have enough of the present sorted out to think about the future. People trying to get through today may have very little room for another assignment.
I want our response to make more room for people to participate. We can help each other build confidence, skills, relationships, and the experience of doing something that matters.
The future depends in part on whether we build that capacity. Public health has a contribution to make beyond preparing for the consequences of climate change. We can bring what we know about policy, social change, and collective action to changing its course.