HMS Physician-Scientist Named WHO Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health

Kerry founded Seed Global Health in 2012 and serves as its CEO. Since then, Seed has trained more than 34,000 nurses, midwives, and physicians and worked strategically to create lasting change in the health systems of Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zambia. Working in those countries, Kerry has seen firsthand the increasingly urgent need to respond to health crises fueled by climate change.

Kerry is a member of the steering committee for the first Day of Health at a United Nations climate change conference, scheduled to take place at COP 28 this year.

Kerry spoke with Harvard Medicine News about her central priorities in tackling the most pressing climate change problems.

HMNews: As a physician, what role can you play in addressing climate change?

Kerry: In many ways, the climate crisis is a health crisis. As the rate of climate change accelerates, we’re seeing more and more disruptive events that have dramatic short- and long-term effects on health.

Extreme heat waves are already killing people all around the world. This puts physicians on the front lines of dealing with the direct fallout of climate change in the clinic, at the hospital, in the exam room. We must identify, diagnose, and treat the manifestations of these crises in our patients and work to prevent them from happening again.

HMNews: Give us a sense of the scale of disruptions we’re talking about.

Kerry: Some estimates forecast more than 1.2 billion people will be displaced by 2050 to escape the catastrophic impacts of climate change.

It’s not just the rising temperature, either. Floods, extreme storms, and forest fires driven by the changing climate all lead directly to worse health in just about every way: infectious disease, noncommunicable disease, maternal mortality, mental health.

These same forces also disrupt agriculture, which costs people their livelihood and leads to poor nutrition. Where there are droughts, people are fighting over water.

The good news is that we know of powerful solutions that can help reduce the harm from all of these different disruptions: a first and less recognized solution is building stronger health systems and investing in the people who deliver care. That way, we have the versatility and resiliency not only to respond to disruptions, but also to protect essential services, and to focus on prevention.

HMNews: That sounds like it’s going to require a new way of thinking about these problems.

Kerry: Right. For too long, policies have focused on the short-term economic bottom line instead of on long-term well-being and human health.

Under the old way of thinking, health is seen as a cost, not as an investment or a form of savings. But investing in health care has one of the highest rates of return of any investment. For every dollar you put in, you get back between two and four dollars.

And that investment continues to pay off. Even if you think of it in the most basic financial terms, by preventing people from becoming sick or dying, you allow them to participate productively in providing for their families and building their communities.

We also need to find ways to overcome our nationalistic and individualistic tendencies, and to embrace our interconnectedness.

Malaria doesn’t hit a border and say, “I'm stopping.”

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HMNews: And of course, neither does pollution.

Kerry: Despite decades of discussion about reducing greenhouse gases we’ve only really started to move beyond debate into action. But those actions have not been fast enough or bold enough.

There is no such thing as too ambitious for this moment. We need to drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to catch up to the Paris targets and to ensure our survival.

HMNews: What will it take to ignite this sense of urgency in policymakers?

Kerry: It’s important to have strong relevant evidence that demonstrates the harm that climate change is already causing — in health, in economics, in security, in gender equity — across sectors, and the terrifying consequences of delayed action. We need to share what is already known, continue to learn more, and ensure that the powerful stories of impact are getting out there.

My work in critical care has reinforced for me the importance and the incredible opportunity we have to prevent serious and severe illness by prioritizing health, well-being, and prevention at the outset, before the patient gets to the ICU.

Working in intensive care during the COVID crisis, it was so painful to see patients who had refused the vaccine for months begging for a vaccine right as we were about to put in the breathing tube. By then, of course, it was too late for the vaccine to help them in that moment.

It seems to me that with the global environmental crisis that we’re facing, we find ourselves approaching the same situation.

Every year we see 7 million deaths worldwide that are caused by air pollution, a lot of it from burning the same fuels that are driving climate change. That’s more than the three-year death toll from COVID. Somehow, so far there’s not much fuss over those 7 million preventable deaths.

The WHO estimates that one out of every four deaths around the world is linked to a preventable environmental cause.

Those of us who do have the resources need to work with urgency to find, to fund, and to execute on the kind of long-term solutions that can yield results not just for those in our immediate vicinity, but for the whole world.

We all have a role to play, and we need to realize that we all benefit when we reduce disparities and close equity gaps, invest in well-being over just an expedient economic bottom line, and ensure our collective survival.