White House launches climate change health initiative

The Obama administration launched a host of initiatives on Tuesday meant to minimize the impact of climate change on public health. 

The plan wraps in a handful of federal departments that deal with health, the environment or both, from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

{mosads}The White House is holding a summit on climate change and health on Tuesday. The new push comes after the EPA rolled out a study on the economic benefits of its climate change agenda, including public health spending, and as The Lancet, a medical journal, published a major report on climate change’s health effects.

“Climate change is a medical emergency,” Hugh Montgomery, the co-chair of the commission that wrote the report, said in a Tuesday statement. “It thus demands an emergency response, using the technologies available right now.”

Under the White House’s plan, HHS will create a tool to support residential areas where people rely on electricity to power medical equipment, and the NOAA and the CDC will launch an excessive heat warning system. The EPA will host a web series for local health and environmental officials on climate change and public health.

An HHS office and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences will partner with a software company to promote new ways to track information on climate change and health. The Federal Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice will form a new committee to look at the issue, as well.  

The plan also includes commitments from medical schools and public health organizations to continue focusing on the health impacts of climate change.