Let’s Build America’s Climate and Health Capacity Together
I’ve spent most of my career at the intersection of climate change and human health. During my 15 years in federal service, I helped build the scientific foundation for the government’s work on climate and health, stewarding the health work of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and directing the NIH’s Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health Sciences. In 2021, I took on a new challenge, establishing and leading the Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Climate Change and Health Equity (OCCHE), to guide HHS and the whole-of-government strategy on climate and health. It was both the best opportunity of my professional life and the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
At OCCHE, we worked to meet that challenge with the relevant federal government levers. We built the country’s first seasonal health forecast, the Climate and Health Outlook, so communities could see hazards like heat and wildfire smoke before they arrived. We supported Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in enabling health systems to use microgrids as emergency backup power, opening the door to scaling clean energy. We launched the HHS-White House Health Sector Climate Pledge that drew commitments from 900 hospitals. We ran dozens of webinars to help the nation’s rural and safety net hospitals learn how to access vital Inflation Reduction Act funding. None of it was the whole answer, especially because we were never given sufficient resources for the work that needed to be done, but all of it showed that the capabilities and coordination were worth having.
OCCHE no longer exists. It was eliminated, along with much of the federal infrastructure built to address climate’s health threats. I won’t pretend that was easy to experience. But I have been in this field long enough to know that its most stubborn obstacle is not any single administration. It is attention, recognition, and political will. We need to build a durable coalition that can fight for sustained progress.
Ask people what worries them most right now, and they’ll say the cost of living and their livelihoods, not climate change. But those concerns are not separate. The heat that sends someone to the emergency room, the smoke that keeps a child home from school, the drought that drives up food prices, the storm that knocks out the power of a rural clinic: these are the moments when climate change stops being an abstraction and starts costing people money, time, and their health. This summer, none of that has been hypothetical. During the hottest month the country has ever recorded, towns across Washington fled from wildfires, combined heat and smoke waves across the Midwest and East Coast made it deadly to be outside, and critical water sources along the Colorado River hit their lowest levels ever.
When we lead with those costs, and with solutions that bring them down, we reach people who would never call themselves climate voters. A family whose home is weatherized stays cooler in a heat wave and pays less every month in energy bills. We too often treat health, climate and cost reductions as competing priorities. Done well in our space, they are one and the same investment.
The work has not stopped despite federal headwinds. States and local governments, health systems, researchers, community organizations, philanthropies, and private-sector partners are making progress on decarbonization and resilience, often more creatively than before. When I talk with them, I rarely hear a shortage of ideas or commitment. I hear about a shortage of cross-sector collaboration and resources. There is a need to bring stakeholders across the country together to co-develop a shared sense of priorities, identify better ways to collaborate, and articulate a practical strategy for building national capacity that can outlast any one office or administration.
That is why I’ve taken on a new effort at the Federation of American Scientists, in partnership with the Aspen Global Change Institute’s Climate Reserve, to strengthen America’s climate-health capacity. We are bringing together leaders to look honestly at where the climate and health field stands and where we can accelerate progress together. We will map where capabilities have been diminished, identify the state, local, and private-sector models worth scaling, and build a shared strategy for coordinated action. That means taking on some of the hardest pieces: building trust amidst groups with different perspectives, identifying opportunities where political will, capacity and impact align, and creating a pipeline of sustainable funding for work at the climate and health nexus.
I believe by working together, we can reduce pollution from a health system responsible for roughly 8.5 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, strengthen the resilience of hospitals, community clinics, and nursing homes, support the health and social services workforce, restore the data and early-warning systems that let us anticipate risk, and direct investment toward building healthy, thriving communities. And in the process we can reduce operating expenses for health care facilities and improve the health of everyone in the country. These are the capabilities a changing climate demands of us, and they are well within our reach.
OCCHE was a beginning, not a finished model. We need to define the capabilities the nation needs to protect health in a changing climate, and to make sure they exist and can be used, wherever they ultimately live. America has extraordinary expertise in climate and health. The work ahead is to turn that expertise into coordinated national capacity and into the connections that make it useful when a community needs it most.
If your organization is working on climate and health, I would like to hear from you. This is a moment for building, let’s do it together.
Ask people what worries them most right now, and they’ll say the cost of living and their livelihoods, not climate change. But those concerns are not separate.
99% of the natural gas sampled near the point of extraction across the country contains hazardous air pollutants harmful to health.
Occupations with skills essential to making and managing awards were among the hardest hit. As a result, many energy innovation programs ground to a halt in 2025.
The Federation of American Scientists supports the Wildfire Emissions Prevention Act of 2026 (WEPA). The Act would amend Section 319(b) of the Clean Air Act so that it addresses prescribed burns as a standalone activity. If passed, this bill would support wildfire resilience by reducing administrative barriers to getting needed prescribed burns on the ground. […]