Open data. New tech. Better climate solutions.

Last week I joined a panel of experts at the White House as part of President Obama’s newly announced actions to protect communities from the health impacts of climate change.

His actions couldn’t have come sooner.  Climate change threatens the air, water, food, shelter and security on which human life depends. As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has noted, climate change’s devastating impacts on health range from heat illnesses to dengue fever to food and water-borne illnesses. In the coming decades,  climate change will be responsible for an additional 250,000 deaths per year globally from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress, and will cost $2-4 billion/year by 2030.

{mosads}In my home state of California, the drought has already left families without tap water to drink or prepare their food, tens of thousands out of work, and increased food insecurity due to rising food prices. These are climate change issues, and they are health issues. And they are having the most impact on already vulnerable and impoverished communities.

“The climate gap” means that the poor, the sick, the elderly, and people of color—the same communities that are already disproportionately impacted by disease, illness, and injury—are again disproportionately harmed by the impacts of climate change.  People with chronic illness are more susceptible to rising ozone levels. Those who live in tree-poor urban heat islands–or who work outdoors in construction or agriculture– are at higher risk of heat illness.  People living in poverty are less able to cope with rising food prices, or to rebuild their lives after a Katrina or a Sandy.

On the panel, called Data & Innovation at the Climate-Health Nexus, I joined representatives from Microsoft, Google and others as they talked about how their companies are harnessing data to help address the many health and human impacts of climate change. We can now track and map increasing pollution and pollen, drought, changing mosquito habitat, rising sea levels, crop yield declines, water scarcity, and scorching temperatures—and their impacts on community health and resilience.

We need tracking and mapping.  We also need to empower communities to act on the information they provide, bringing long term commitment, funding, and innovative policies that advance equitable solutions and address the root causes of climate change. 

Climate change may be the defining health challenge of the century, but it  also presents a great health opportunity.  To kick the fossil fuel habit and avert a catastrophic climate crisis, we need urgent transformational changes to our energy, transportation, agricultural, and land use systems. Those same changes could significantly reduce air pollution-related respiratory and cardiovascular disease, protect our ever more precious drinking water from contamination, and support the integration of physical activity into our daily lives—with huge benefits across the spectrum of chronic disease.

For example, our  transportation system produces carbon dioxide and chokes our air with smog, while our over-reliance on cars supports sedentary lifestyles that contribute to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, osteoporosis, and cancer. A sustainable and healthy transportation system protects the environment and protects health.

Data and tech experts have already built tools that aim to harness individual health data to drive individual behavior change, what I call the FitBit model. But we can’t address individual behavior alone and expect to solve climate change. We must use this data to mobilize and empower communities to demand the policy and systems changes that will have the greatest impact.

When tethered to community wisdom, tech tools can open the door for better public health and climate policy. They can help us understand the impacts to our planet and our health—and it’s up to us to act on that knowledge to protect our future.

Rudolph is the director of the Public Health Institute’s Center for Climate Change and Health and a White House “Climate and Health Champion of Change.”