Planetary Health: Investigating the Intersections of Environmental and Public Health

My presentation will focus on the following two planetary health research areas: 1) modeling the impact of terrestrial and marine wildlife declines in affecting global human food security; and 2) developing a climate-smart health surveillance system that will integrate environmental, climate, agricultural, and health monitoring data to understand the underlying causes of ill health and how to predict them in the future. These two research areas beg for collaboration across disciplines and I welcome feedback from the broader CRCS community.  My research was designed to create an analytic framework and architecture that will allow decision-makers to calculate the health implications of different natural resource management strategies at a variety of scales from local to global. I will highlight global trends and then showcase a range of case studies (e.g., Madagascar, Kiribati, Bangladesh, Cambodia, coastal British Columbia, and others). 

Chris Golden is an Assistant Professor of Planetary Health and Nutrition at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. He is an ecologist and epidemiologist, whose research investigates the nexus of trends in global environmental change and human health. He received his BA from Harvard College and two graduate degrees from UC Berkeley: an MPH in Epidemiology, and a PhD in Environmental Science. For the past 20 years, Golden has been conducting environmental and public health research in Madagascar where he created a non-profit organization called Madagascar Health and Environmental Research.