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The Cabot Institute for the Environment and the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research invite you to the fourth in a series of Climate Change and Health seminars.
In this seminar, Dr Eunice Lo and Emma Benham will speak about quantifying the health burden of extreme weather in a changing climate.
Dr Eunice Lo
Dr Eunice Lo is a climate scientist at the University of Bristol, where she leads research on climate change and health. Her research focuses on extreme weather events and their impacts on human health, both now and in the future. This includes investigating changes in heatwaves, humidity, cold weather, and other hazards between different time periods and climate change scenarios, including counterfactual ones for forming impact attribution statements. Eunice’s work utilises weather and climate observations and large ensembles, as well as statistical health models, thereby uniquely bridging the gap between climate science and epidemiology. Eunice won the 2024 L F Richardson Award from the Royal Meteorological Society, as well as the 2024 Emerging Leaders Prize from the Medical Research Foundation. She was a contributing author in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and held an honorary position at the UK Health Security Agency for two years. She is experienced in providing scientific evidence to UK governments, climate litigation, and the media.
Abstract
Research on climate-health impacts often rely on academic expertise and expert judgement. In a climate where many extreme weather events are felt across the world, essentially everyone is an expert of their own experience of extreme weather. Gathering these lived experiences are important to fill in the gaps in our understanding of what the weather does to our health and wellbeing, as many weather-related impacts may not end up in a GP consultation or hospital admission. Asking how people cope with extreme weather also offers insights into how government agencies could help the public improve adverse weather planning. In this talk, I’ll present findings from our recent ‘extreme weather lived experience surveys’ with the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) cohort.
Emma Benham - Quantifying the health burden of extreme weather in a changing climate
Emma is a PhD student focusing on the impact of climate change on health, based in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. Her research aims to attribute the physical and mental health impacts of extreme weather to human-induced climate change. Emma’s interest in the field stems from a desire to help society prepare for the growing impacts of climate change and to safeguard the health and wellbeing of vulnerable communities.
Abstract
To ensure that health and social care systems are prepared for ‘unprecedented’ extreme events like the 2022 heatwave and increase societal adaptation and resilience to climate change, it is important to quantify the health impacts of extreme weather events due to climate change. This talk will cover how we can understand the link between observed heatwaves and the associated health impacts in today’s climate, via climate-health modelling. Then, how can these models be applied to separating the human-induced component of these impacts from the natural component and climate noise, using climate impact attribution techniques. Understanding how much of the health burden from extreme events can be attributed to human-driven climate change is crucial for communicating climate risks and motivating action.