When
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
The seminar is open to ITM staff, students and alumni. Interested members of the public can participate upon registration.
ITM’s Ecohealth group is organising a webinar series in which speakers will discuss current challenges such as climate change, globalisation, urbanisation and emerging diseases, and illustrate how systems approaches can be applied to better understand the issues, analyse their root causes and inform solutions.
On 3 November, Professor Maria Nilsson will give a talk entitled “ Climate change and health“. She will discuss the health impacts and vulnerabilities, including mental health aspects, as well as the work of the Lancet Countdown in general, focusing on adaptation, planning and resilience for health.
Speaker
Maria Nilsson, Professor in public health with the orientation climate change and health,is a social scientist with a PhD in epidemiology and public health sciences. She is based at the Department of Epidemiology and Global Health, Umeå University, Sweden. Her main interest is adaptation research, risk and health communication and knowledge translation in the knowledge area climate change and global health.
Prof. Nilsson was the integrating editor for health in the 2015 “Lancet Commission – Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health” and co-leads the working group on adaptation, planning, and resilience for health in the annual follow up till 2030; “The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change”. Prof. Nilsson was a member of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) working group on climate change and health publishing a report in 2019 that focused on discussing risks in Europe, particularly in the near future and the opportunities for adaptation and mitigation. She is a member of a new EASAC expert-group focusing on decarbonisation of buildings.
She leads projects in low to high income countries; in “Dengue risk communication in a local community – understanding knowledge, attitudes and practice to improve action” an Early Warning System for Dengue fever is created with a solid base in the local community in Indonesia (PI). In “Household Preferences for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in four European high-income countries – HOPE” (WP-leader) households’ willingness to substantially reduce their climate footprint from private consumption and how existing policies affected the possibility was studied. In connection to her projects she is engaged in increasing the understanding of climate change and health impacts, working actively to feed research evidence into policy in practice. In 2017 she was awarded a fellowship from the Swedish Institute for Global Health Transformation (SIGHT), under the auspices of the Swedish Royal academy of Sciences, for global health leadership.
Moderator
Claudia Nieto-Sanchez is a Researcher in the Medical Anthropology Unit (MAU) at the Public Health Department of ITM. Claudia Nieto-Sanchez’ work has been mainly focused on designing, implementing and evaluating health interventions informed by community engagement strategies and systemic approaches to disease prevention. Her research is currently focused in understanding the conditions under which vector control interventions based on housing improvement and spatial modifications can lead to sustainable prevention of infectious diseases.
About the Ecohealth group
The Ecohealth group brings together researchers from ITM’s 3 departments, from eco-epidemiology, infectious disease control, clinical medicine, political science, anthropology and health systems). The group adopts a whole systems approach to making sense of health and health problems. Its starting point is the dynamic interactions between human, social, biological, ecological and political systems and how that affects the health of people. This in turn demands a transdisciplinary approach and the active engagement and participation of key stakeholders in order to co-create solutions for transformative, sustainable and equitable change.
Watch the second EcoHealth webinar from 8 October on the ITM YouTube channel:
