This week (June 19) Jonathan Patz of the School of Medicine & Public Health and of the Global Health Institute returns to WN@TL to ask, “How Might Solving the Global Climate Crisis Create the Largest Health Benefit of the Century?”

Here’s how he describes his talk:

"Global Climate Change poses multiple severe risks to our health, and yet, the low carbon economy needed to solve today’s climate crisis will offer enormous health benefits, particularly in the area of chronic diseases. In this presentation, health risks from climate change will be summarized, as well as studies documenting the potential health gains emerging from across the energy, food, and transportation sectors.

About the Speaker:

Jonathan Patz, MD, MPH, is Professor & John P. Holton Chair in Health and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also directs the Global Health Institute. Patz co-chaired the health expert panel of the first Congressionally mandated US National Assessment on Climate Change and was a convening lead author for the international Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

For 14 years, Patz was a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 1994, Dr. Patz convened the first-ever session on climate change for the American Public Health Association (APHA) and authored the organization’s first policy resolution on climate change in 1995. In 1997, he organized the first climate change/health briefing to an EPA administrator (Carol Browner) and has been invited to brief both houses of Congress and serve on scientific committees of the National Academy of Sciences.

From 2006 to 2010, Patz served as Founding President of the International Association for Ecology and Health. Professor Patz received an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellows Award in 2005, and a UW-Madison Romnes Faculty Fellow award in 2009. He shared the Zayed International Prize for the Environment in 2006, won a Fulbright Scholar award in 2014, recieved APHA’s Homer Calver Award for environmental health leadership in 2015, and the 2017 Alumni Special Recognition award from Case Western School of Medicine.

He’s written nearly 100 peer-reviewed papers plus multiple reports, two co-edited textbooks and an encyclopedia on global environmental health.

Explore more at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Dpkn_wi54 (TEDx Talk)
http://nelson.wisc.edu/sage/people/profile.php?p=1522
http://ghi.wisc.edu/person-types/leadership/