The impacts of climate change, from extreme weather events that decimate the world’s poorest nations to polluted air and water that disproportionately affect our country’s poorest neighborhoods, damage our planet and stress our social and economic systems. What are the moral responsibilities of developing nations in providing for and protecting the poorest and most vulnerable among us who are most impacted by these unfolding, worldwide devastations?

Join us to hear from leading experts about:

• Why climate change is disproportionally impacting the health and wellness of the poor

• What we can do as individuals to help those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change

• Steps the US can and should take to become a worldwide climate leader

Speakers:

• Aaron Bernstein MD, moderator, MPH Co-Director of C-CHANGE (Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Pediatric Hospitalist, Boston Children's Hospital, focuses on the health impacts of the climate crisis on children’s health and advancing solutions to address its causes to improve the health and wellbeing of children around the world. In 2019, Dr. Bernstein testified before Congress on the child health impacts of climate change, drawing from his personal experience as a pediatrician having to treat children with breathing difficulties, vector-borne diseases, and trauma from natural disasters.

• William G. Kaelin Jr., MD, Nobel Laureate, Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, is the 2019 Nobel Prize recipient in physiology or medicine. Dr. Kaelin received his MD from Duke University in 1982 and was a house officer and chief resident in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was a medical oncology clinical fellow at Dana-Farber and a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. David Livingston, where he began his studies of tumor suppressor proteins. He became an independent investigator at Dana-Farber in 1992, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in 2002. The 2019 Nobel was awarded jointly to Kaelin, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.

• Renee N. Salas, MD, MPH, MS, Clinical Instructor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an emergency medicine physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), is a 2018 Burke Fellow is addressing the current research gaps in climate change and health. She served as the lead for the 2018 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change U.S. Brief and is a nationally recognized leader on this subject. (moderator)