SIR ANDY HAINES

SIR ANDY HAINES

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Tyler Prize Award-winner for Environmental Achievement
Professor of Environmental Change & Public Health
Fmr. Chair of WHO World Health Report · Rockefeller /Lancet Commission on Planetary Health

In terms of the impacts of climate change on health when we started 30 years ago, because there was very little data then, so we made suggestions as to what we thought the health outcomes we thought would be affected like vector-borne diseases, crop failures, water availability, sea level rise, increasing disasters related to climatic extreme events, and obviously the effects of extreme heat on vulnerable populations. In particular, elderly people, but not just elderly people. So we suggested a whole range of different health impacts that could occur. And I think, in general, those ideas have stood the test of time, but of course, as the situation has moved on, we've also become much more preoccupied with what kind of action we need to take.

BRITT WRAY

BRITT WRAY

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Author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis
Broadcaster and Researcher Working on Climate Change and Mental Health

I think the general waking up that I'm seeing around me in so many different parts of society, people from all walks understanding that this is here, it's not a future threat. It's active now. We need to get smart about addressing it. A lot of people are also asking themselves how can I be of service? What can I do at this time? How am I going to be? And you know, the more climate job boards and networking communities and sites of bringing people together to do that work of figuring out how they're going to go on their climate journey while infusing it with a sense of joy, with a sense of how can we make this fun, right? How can we reshift so this is not just focusing on the negative, but really focusing on what we want to be building and what is abundant and the better life that we're working towards? All of that has been popping up a lot and that gives me an honest sense of hope. So a lot of it is about that relationality, creating conditions of solidarity that bring a sense of stability and security. Even though there's a lot of uncertainty about what the impacts will be and how they're going to affect us, each and every one of us, in the decades ahead. There needs to, amidst all that uncertainty, be other things that can undergird a child and make them feel held, safe, secure, and like they belong to a protective community that's thinking and feeling with them through this.

JAY FAMIGLIETTI

JAY FAMIGLIETTI

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Hydrologist, Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security, U of Saskatchewan
Host of the Podcast What About Water?

I think water is taking a backseat and personally, I feel like water is the messenger that delivers the bad news of climate change to your front door. So in the work that I do, it's heavily intertwined, but it's taking a backseat. There are parts about water that are maybe separate from climate change, and that could be the quality discussions, the infrastructure discussions, although they are somewhat loosely related to climate change and they are impacted by climate change. That's sometimes part of the reason why it gets split off because it's thought of as maybe an infrastructure problem, but you know, the changing extremes, the aridification of the West, the increasing frequency, the increasing droughts, these broad global patterns that I've been talking about, that I've been looking at with my research – that's all climate change. Just 100% climate change, a hundred percent human-driven. And so it does need to be elevated in these climate change discussions.

MONA SARFATY & EDWARD MAIBACH

MONA SARFATY & EDWARD MAIBACH

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Executive Director & Founder of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health
Director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication

Humanity needs to do three things if it wants to continue to flourish, and it will. The three things that humanity needs to do are decarbonize the global economy, drawdown, capture, harvest much of that heat-trapping pollution that we've already pumped into the atmosphere over the past hundred years because as long as it's up in our atmosphere, we're going to have continued warming. And the third thing that humanity needs to do is become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, which unfortunately will continue for the next several generations at least, even as we succeed in decarbonizing the global economy and harvesting that heat-trapping pollution from the atmosphere.

So these are the three things that have to happen. These three things will happen. The open question is how rapidly will they happen? Any business that can play a vital role in making any one or two or all three of those things happen, those are businesses that are going to flourish going forward. And any business that's sitting on the side and not contributing to one of those three areas, I really think they will become increasingly irrelevant, if not completely antiquated and increasingly understood to be harmful.