Prof. Ana Maria Vicedo Cabrera on:
“Is climate change to blame?”
Climate change is threatening years of hard-earned advancements in public health. Extreme events such as heatwaves and floods are becoming more frequent and intense, and leading to thousands of deaths and a substantial increase in healthcare demand. In the aftermath of these extreme events, there is immediate interest in clarifying whether climate change “cause” the event, or more importantly, how much of the observed health impacts can be attributed to anthropogenic activities leading to the warming of the climate. This is the goal of health impact attribution studies, an emerging research area in climate epidemiology. Evidence of studies is highly relevant for the communication of the risks and in decision-making processes. New methods, mostly from combinations of climate attribution and epidemiology approaches, have been developed and applied in recent high-impact contributions. However, the complexity of the method and interpretation of the evidence requires proper guidelines on how to frame the research and design the study. This talk will provide a historical overview of the origins of attribution studies in climate change research and discuss the new developments in health impact studies and their parallelisms with other research areas in epidemiology.
Thursday, 23 January 2025, 6:45 pm – 7:45 pm
Venue: Cinema Wengen