The climate change-health nexus

A $6.7 million climate and health research grant that the National Institutes of Health awarded to two Boston-area universities could help turbocharge the federal government’s work on the overlapping issues.
The three-year grant to the Boston University School of Public Health and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health isn’t a typical NIH research grant. Instead, it focuses on infrastructure and collaboration.
“There’s so much desire to create solutions to reduce the health harms of climate change,” said BU’s Gregory Wellenius, a co-leader of the initiative. “But we haven’t had an effective forum to accelerate that and connect those designing solutions to those who are in need of solutions.”
A different type of collaboration: Typically, the NIH funds specific projects that researchers undertake independently. The new center will work collaboratively with NIH and is called the BUSPH-Harvard Chan School CAFÉ, which stands for convene, accelerate, foster and expand.
It will also bring together groups invested in climate that rarely engage with one another: researchers, mayors of climate-impacted cities, concerned communities, the tech sector and non-governmental organizations.
The hope is that sharing ideas and data, and widening the climate-health research field, will speed solutions and avoid duplicative efforts.

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