Health under Climate Pressure… and Why A Transdisciplinary Approach Is Necessary

About

In an unprecedented move, in July 2023 the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe declared the climate crisis and its associated extreme weather events a public health emergency. People are increasingly experiencing the health impacts of climate change as extreme weather events—such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall, floods, droughts, and storms—become more frequent. By the end of this century it is estimated that nearly two-thirds of Europe’s population will be affected by weather-related disasters annually. This will lead to a cascade of health impacts, including rising mortality rates, the spread of diseases and infections, and various impacts from changing ecosystemic conditions, all of which are further exacerbated by wider societal dynamics.

Program:

In this presentation, tdAcademy Fellow Dr. Isabella Radhuber (University of Vienna) will explore two main topics:

1) how health can be understood in a changing climate and

2) what kinds of research can contribute to addressing conceptual questions, practical challenges and policy interventions.

The presentation will be held in dialogue with participants in order to exchange ideas on these two questions. While analysing the causal relationships between predefined categories may prove insufficient, qualitative research approaches that closely examine people’s experiences related to extreme weather events may yield unexpected results and acknowledge complexity of the situation. These approaches facilitate an understanding of health as a multidimensionally constituted state, shaped by "natural", biological, ecological, and socio-political-economic dimensions that interact across time and space. But what could transdisciplinary climate and health research look like? A central question is how collaborators perceive, experience and address the challenges arising from the interactions between climate and health. Both inductive and abductive approaches, including Situational Analysis, offer the potential to integrate existing knowledge about how people perceive environmental changes, how they experience related health impacts, and how they navigate complex social, political, and economic dynamics. There is significant potential for researchers, scientific communities, and academia to tackle the most pressing health challenges of the 21st century through transdisciplinary collaboration (despite the numerous institutional barriers that persist for such research). Transdisciplinary research can deepen our understanding of the multidimensional nature of health in a changing climate. It also holds the potential to identify critical leverage points for political interventions, prompting a reassessment of the strategies employed in public health delivery and the evolving role of states in safeguarding public health amid climate change.

This presentation is based on a forthcoming book chapter: Radhuber, I.M., Fiske, A., Prainsack, B. (2025). Health Under Climate Pressure: An Emerging Research Agenda. In Faulkner, A. (Ed.), A Research Agenda in Biomedicine & Society. Elgar Research Agendas.

Speakers/Facilitator:

Isabella Radhuber is a political scientist with a research focus on climate and health, (global) inequalities, and decolonisation. She was a tdA-fellow in October, November 2023 and January 2024.

Registration:

Participants should register by November 27th, by emailing website@td-academy.org with the subject “Registration webinar Health under Climate Pressure” and indicating their name and affiliation in the main message body.