First Annual National Health And Climate Change Science And Policy Research Consensus Conference - How Will Climate Change Affect Priorities For Your Health Science And Policy Research?

Welcome and Objectives

• Michael Sharpe
  Climate Change and Health Office, Health Canada

On behalf of Health Canada and its federal partners in climate change, Natural Resources Canada and Environment Canada, Michael Sharpe welcomed participants to the first-ever conference in Canada that concentrates on building a research agenda on health and climate change. He said Health Canada would like to see this event occur annually, and emphasized its focus on consensus-building.

Sharpe stated that the conference was concerned with increasing understanding of the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of the human system to all elements of climate change, and of humans' adaptive capacity to adjust to climate change.

Timing is everything in the study of climate change, Sharpe stressed. Over the past 10 years, climate scientists have developed a better understanding of the physical factors that influence climate change and climate variability. They have also improved the technology used to assess how the global and regional climate might change. Now it is possible to study how health might be affected across regions and sub-population groups.

The purpose of this conference is to bring together scientists and researchers from diverse disciplines to identify the work that needs to be done, the research gaps that currently exist, and the questions that should form the research agenda for the next several years. Sharpe noted that the research agenda can be used to alert governments, research funding agencies and other groups whose support is needed to get the work done.

At each annual conference, he explained, the research agenda developed this week will be revised. The goal is to keep building a foundation of scientific and experiential evidence that will be used as input to a Canada-wide policy and planning conference each September.

Turning to the conference agenda, Sharpe explained that the morning presentations were intended to raise awareness of new methods, data sources and research disciplines with which health and social researchers and policy analysts are not familiar, and that they must learn to incorporate into their work. He stressed the need to move from a multidisciplinary research focus to a truly collaborative, interdisciplinary focus and ultimately to a transdisciplinary agenda, leading to new models that can explain some of the new problems facing climate researchers.

Sharpe cited a model in a US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) document that showed the interactions between atmospheric and ecological systems, suggesting that the physical climate model reflected the world of climate change research and policy-making as it has been conducted so far. While the model considers human activity as a factor, he stressed the need to distinguish the dynamics of health and well-being from the broader categories of human activities and physical climate systems if the human half of the climate change equation is to be properly understood.

Turning to a table used by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US EPA to categorize the direct and indirect sensitivities and vulnerabilities of health to climate change, Sharpe noted that Health Canada has added two key areas for examination: Population vulnerabilities in cities and communities, and health and socioeconomic impacts. The new categories reflect a desire to ensure that social sensitivities are included in the discussion, and that the adaptive capacity of potentially affected sub-populations in Canada is adequately explored.

Sharpe mentioned that the conference proceedings will be posted on the Health Canada website ( www.hc-sc.gc.ca/cc ) throughout the conference, and that the final research agenda will be posted by next week. He outlined the questions that will be discussed in each workshop session:

1. What are the strengths and limitations of the current state of knowledge, methods, data sources and capacity?
2. What are the missing gaps in knowledge, methods, data sources and capacity?
3. Over the next five years, what are the research questions that need to be answered to start filling the gaps and limitations in knowledge, methods, data sources and capacity?
4. Is there a need for a central health sector node to support all health issue networks? Is this the best way to ensure that everyone is kept informed and engaged from this point on?