Department of Environmental & Radiological Health Sciences, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado.
Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado.
Am J Epidemiol. 2019 May 1;188(5):866-872. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwz034.
In the coming decades, climate change is expected to dramatically affect communities worldwide, altering the patterns of many ambient exposures and disasters, including extreme temperatures, heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods. These exposures, in turn, can affect risks for a variety of human diseases and health outcomes. Climate epidemiology plays an important role in informing policy related to climate change and its threats to public health. Climate epidemiology leverages deep, integrated collaborations between epidemiologists and climate scientists to understand the current and potential future impacts of climate-related exposures on human health. A variety of recent and ongoing developments in climate science are creating new avenues for epidemiologic contributions. Here, we discuss the contributions of climate epidemiology and describe some key current research directions, including research to better characterize uncertainty in climate health projections. We end by outlining 3 developing areas of climate science that are creating opportunities for high-impact epidemiologic advances in the near future: 1) climate attribution studies, 2) subseasonal to seasonal forecasts, and 3) decadal predictions.
在未来几十年中，气候变化预计将极大地影响全球各地的社区，改变许多环境暴露和灾害的模式，包括极端温度、热浪、野火、干旱和洪水。这些暴露因素反过来又会影响各种人类疾病和健康结果的风险。气候流行病学在为与气候变化及其对公共健康的威胁相关的政策提供信息方面发挥着重要作用。气候流行病学利用流行病学家和气候科学家之间深入、综合的合作，了解与气候相关的暴露对人类健康的当前和潜在未来影响。气候科学的许多最新和正在进行的发展为流行病学的贡献开辟了新途径。在这里，我们讨论了气候流行病学的贡献，并描述了一些当前的关键研究方向，包括更好地描述气候健康预测不确定性的研究。最后，我们概述了气候科学中正在为未来不久产生重大影响的流行病学进展创造机会的 3 个发展领域：1）气候归因研究，2）亚季节到季节预测，3）年代际预测。
