In the News:
- Congratulations to Bethany Hedt-Gauthier on her recent R01! The study will evaluate the generalizability of visible and thermal image-based surgical site infection prediction algorithms and explore methods to create more versatile AI algorithms that are accurate across diverse skin tones in Rwanda, Ghana and Mexico.
From the Director:
Last fall, I wrote about our first Global Health and Climate Change workshop that involved multiple Core members and which was sponsored by Harvard’s Salata institute. In June, we held a second Climate Change and Health Workshop, this time as one of the inaugural 2024 Harvard Global Health Institute’s new Scholarly Working Groups. The meeting brought together a diverse array of global health practitioners and researchers to focus on climate-related health issues experienced by local communities and caregivers in areas around the world that are most at risk. In addition to a group of Harvard faculty working in global health, the workshop included participants from east, west and southern Africa, from central and south America, from South Asia and from the Arctic regions of the US and Scandinavia.
One of the major themes that emerged from presentations by implementers from Malawi, Liberia, Lesotho, and Madagascar focused on the impact of extreme weather events on the medical infrastructure needed to deliver high-quality care in these settings. In the past several years, Malawi and Madagascar have both experienced devastating losses from cyclones that displaced tens of thousands of people and not only destroyed homes and health clinics but also made the roads linking people to healthcare facilities unpassable. Lesotho has experienced more severe winters with heavy snowfall making it even more difficult for those living in remote areas to access care.
The team from South Asia described how soaring temperatures in India have threatened the health and livelihoods of the most impoverished segments of the population. We learned about the work of the India-based Self-employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in using heat sensors to establish the actual temperatures experienced by those living in urban slums and working in cities.
Teams working in the Peruvian Andes and in rural Guyana and Guatemala presented on a wide range of climate-related health issues experienced in those settings. Water insecurity is a pressing problem in the Andes where it affects many aspects of daily life, including child health.
In Guatemala, agricultural workers are subject to many of the same stresses as SEWA members in India as they work harvesting sugar cane in brutally hot environments. In Guyana, loss of local livelihoods has led climate-related migration and the rise of gold mining which has a direct impact on the distribution of malaria in that setting.
One of my favorite sessions of the workshop was the session on the Arctic. We were privileged to host Corina Qaagraq Kramer from Kotzebue, Alaska. Corina shared a poignant account of how coastal erosion had forced local Native people to abandon their homes and move to new villages, and how melting permafrost was undermining the nutritional status of the elderly who have long subsisted on hunted caribou and seal, foods that are increasingly difficult to obtain as the climate warms. Dr. Annikki Herranen-Tabibi, a climate anthropologist and currently a Burke Climate and Health Fellow, presented some of the findings of her collaborative research with the Sápmi people in the northern territories of Norway and Sweden.
Both presenters emphasized the importance of careful and nuanced listening to the local community and need for “western” researchers to maintain an attitude of cultural humility and respect for local expertise and knowledge.
On the second day of the workshop, researchers presented a variety of different tools that might be used to address climate change either through research or direct care; these ranged from tools to identify different types mosquito populations, to identify pathogens in remote areas of the Amazon, to map areas vulnerable to extreme weather events. We also discussed how these tools might complement other ways of knowing, focusing in Indigenous epistemology. All in all, I found it to be an inspiring event, informative and data-driven but also sensitive to the very human aspects of the threat of climate change. We look forward to working with this growing network in the future and working with HGHI to support communication among people sharing similar problems and (hopefully) solutions throughout the Global South.
