Focus Areas
Focus Areas
GW’s Climate & Health Institute is involved in research across a wide range of disciplines focused on how the changing climate is affecting human health.
Air Pollution & Asthma
Air Pollution is a key topic for understanding the effects of emissions on respiratory diseases. On a global scale, greenhouse gas emissions are among the biggest contributors to climate change.
Sustainability
Climate change and sustainability are dynamically intertwined where our global lifestyles, consumption, and wasteful choices pollute and exploit resources unsustainably which are the causes of climate change.
Extreme Weather and Ecosystem Change
As climate change intensifies weather patterns, it is of utmost importance to recognize its effect on human health, infrastructure, and ecosystems.
The Arctic
Studying this region presents unique challenges due to its remote location, cold and changing climate, thin largely resource-based economy, and lack of local knowledge on emission sources and its health impacts.
Occupational Health
Climate change poses a lot of risks to the occupational health and safety of those around the world.
Social Movements & Climate Change
Climate change has increasingly become an emergency that we as citizens of the world have to come together to face.
Risk Assessment & Policy
Climate change is a prevailing problem that is affecting our health and safety of humans and the environments around us.
Climate Litigation
As climate change continues to harm human health, there will continue to be a wide range of pressing legal challenges that we will seek to address its compounding effects.
Infectious Diseases
Infectious disease will continue to be a risk among people as we continue to circumnavigate the globe at unprecedented rates, change land use, and increase inequality which heightens mosquito exposure due to the lack of public sanitation services.
Food Systems & Nutrition
Climate change impacts agriculture, nutrition and food security, all of which are deeply interlinked.
Mental Health
Shifts in climate can have significant impacts to mental health in addition to physical health. The stress of a changing environment has been linked to depression, insomnia and anxiety.
Equity & Environmental Justice
Climate change drastically impacts low-income communities. Communities of color are disproportionately burdened by extreme heat, air pollution and a variety of other environmental conditions.