Vanessa Kerry Urges Courageous Leadership in Addressing Global Climate-Health Crisis

“That is part of all of our jobs as academics, as politicians, as leaders, as citizens is to really understand that climate change should not be just measured in terms of degrees Celsius up or averted, but actually in lives lost and lives saved. That is really what we're fundamentally talking about is our humanity and our survival,” she said.

Kerry sat down with Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco for a fireside chat to discuss the impacts of climate change on global public health in the Campus Center Ballroom in the second installment of the Chancellor’s Lecture Series: From Climate Crisis to Climate Resilience, part of inauguration week events.

Watch the Chancellor’s Lecture Series here.

Kerry is the co-founder and CEO of Seed Global Health, a nonprofit organization focused on health systems strengthening and transformation through long-term investments and training of the health workforce. Under her leadership, Seed has helped educate more than 34,000 doctors, nurses, and midwives in seven countries, helping to improve health care for more than 73 million people. She is also a WHO Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health, and a critical care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Chancellor Suárez-Orozco spoke of how climate change poses a grave danger to every aspect of public health and clinical medicine. Cyclones, monsoons, floods, hurricanes, drought, heat waves, and forest fires are all increasing the risks of zoonosis and food, water, and vector-borne disease, in addition to exacerbating non-communicable conditions like heart attacks and kidney disease, and undercutting maternal, child, and mental health.

At the same time, the impacts of climate change are increasing inequity, undermining long-term economic growth, and driving migration and insecurity while contributing to cycles of poverty and instability in the most vulnerable countries.

“Pollution from fossil fuels alone leads to over 5 million premature deaths in children and adults every year,” Chancellor Suárez-Orozco said. “We're particularly concerned that over 3.6 billion people on Earth live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change. For them, extreme weather patterns are the new drivers of forced migrations and resource-based conflicts. An average of 21 million folk have been forcibly displaced by weather related events since 2008.”

While everyone is feeling the effects, it’s the most vulnerable populations who are least responsible for emissions but are paying the gravest price.

“Those communities that are already disadvantaged and have the least amount of resources to be able to provide basic health services are those that are getting impacted by the health changes the most and have the least amount of resources to adapt,” Kerry said.

She said decision-makers must understand all the different ways that climate change is impacting our health both directly, but also indirectly, in terms of productivity, incomes, and ability to access health care.

“We really need a new and courageous leadership that is able and willing to make some of these long-term decisions that are about creating a better path to equity and are about humanity. We should not be living in a world where there are two such different standards of care in the world. We should not be living in a world where people are falling deeper and deeper into poverty, where 1.2 billion people are going to be migrants from climate change and lose their homes, lose their security, lose their culture, lose their family, lose their future. Yet so many of the decisions we make are doing that.”

Kerry said there is an opportunity to think about how we create arguments for equity and humanity going forward.

“The moral argument has not moved enough of us. It inspires but it doesn't change behavior,” she said. “We have to change behavior and we have to change it urgently.”

Her organization is creating evidence-based arguments around economics, security, and other vested self-interests to move leaders in the public and private sector to do the right thing.

“We want to get people to invest in global public goods because, yes, it's the right thing to do, but we'll point out to them that for every billion dollars they invest in adaptation and resilience now they'll save $7 billion in loss and damages,” Kerry said. “We will point out that if you build sea walls for $1 billion, you save $14 billion in damages on that front. We will point out that when you invest in strong and resilient health systems you can actually have a workforce that can give you a return on your investment.

“I think if we can just be pragmatic about where some people's minds are who hold the money and power, but give them the evidence base they need, they will want to do well and do good at the same time. We just need to help them get there.”

This was the second event in the Chancellor’s Climate Series, which was created this academic year to engage distinguished thought leaders and scholars on the defining challenges of our times. World-renowned climate scholar Dr. Ram Ramanathan, who discovered the greenhouse effect of CFCs in 1975, joined the chancellor in November to kick off the series.