Turning Climate Data into Action Is ‘Messy, But Urgently Needed’.
Trained as an air pollution epidemiologist, Patrick Kinney says studying climate change “was like shifting into the passing lane.”
Air pollution is of course a cause of climate change, he says, “but also climate affects air pollution. There are all kinds of interesting interactions.” In the late 1990s, Kinney says, “there was plenty to study but nobody was studying it.”
In the years since, Kinney has become an authority on those interactions. He joined the School of Public Health faculty in January 2017 as the inaugural Beverly Brown Professor of Urban Health, a multidisciplinary position supported by a gift from Boston University trustee Richard Shipley.
Kinney, who earned his doctorate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, comes to SPH after two decades at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. In his time at Columbia, he showed how warming temperatures make air pollution like urban smog worse, and more harmful to populations. He led the development of an integrated modeling system to predict the air pollution health effects of climate change into the future. Working at the intersection of climate change, health, and policy, Kinney has conducted research from the South Bronx to China to rapidly growing cities throughout Africa. At Columbia, he also created an interdisciplinary research and teaching program examining the potential impacts of climate change on health.
Kinney says he is excited to get to know and to learn from his new colleagues at SPH and throughout BU. He is also taking advantage of the walkable city, he says, strolling from his new home in the South End to take Wednesday night drawing classes at the Museum of Fine Arts.
He talked with SPH about his research, his new position, and how he stays hopeful and energized in the face of an uncertain future.
How have you seen the public’s relationship with climate change develop over the course of your career?
Since I started working in climate, there’s been a gradual increase in public awareness that these issues are important, and as a result an increasing need for scientific evidence to guide decision-making. For the first 10 years it felt like just a few people doing it, and nobody really cared. The optimism and energy of the Clinton/Gore administration was replaced by the pro-oil, anti-climate change attitude of the Bush administration, leading to a sort of “dark age” for climate and health research.
Ten years ago, Al Gore’s movie and other media helped to educate the general public about the threat of climate change. There was then a backlash from the deniers, which set us back for a while, but recently there’s been a gradually expanding awareness both in the general public as well as in the government and funders that climate change is happening, that we need evidence to figure out what to do, and that we need to take action to protect the planet for our children and grandchildren. Particularly in the last couple of years that began to accelerate exponentially, through the leadership of the Obama administration and with the Paris Climate Accord, China really becoming a leader, and the US working with China. The Obama administration put forward a clean power plan, which is the first climate action at the federal level, and there was also a series of climate and health meetings held at the White House in the last couple of years.
Are you hopeful?
I think that it came to a point at the end of the Obama administration where it’s undeniable that we have to face this issue. Even Republican congressmen believe it for the most part, but still politics get in the way and delay action, because delaying by a year means financial windfalls for certain industries and so if they can delay they will delay.
But it’s encouraging to see that there’s so much momentum in the right direction. I think it’s inevitable that we will actually do something useful. It is very troubling that our action may be delayed, because there’s this huge amount of inertia in the climate system and if you wait another 10 years then it’s going to be far worse. It’s going to be really important to see what happens in the next year in the Trump administration, what exactly he does about climate.
I still think that it’s one of the most important issues we should be working on, so it hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm. Meanwhile, in creating the program at Columbia I was so gratified to see how much interest there was among students. That endorsed the idea that this was important not only to me but that other people care about it and it’s an important issue to work on. That’s energized me over these last 20 years.
What attracted you about the urban health professorship here at SPH?
When I started talking to BU about this position I was intrigued by the urban focus, because urban areas have in some ways been leaders on climate action, while meanwhile the federal government has been lagging behind. Action is happening in urban areas, more people are moving to urban areas, and also climate impacts are particularly severe in urban areas for a variety of reasons, so it’s seems like there’s a lot of opportunity for me to use my knowledge about air pollution and about climate and apply it towards making cities healthier for the population, and healthier for the planet from a sustainability point of view. That got me excited about this job.
This position is designed to be a University-wide position even though I sit in the environmental health department in the School of Public Health. Part of my mandate and part of my interest is to link up with other parts of BU to get researchers working together, because these issues of sustainability and urban health and climate can’t be solved just by us. We need to get the earth scientists involved, and the urban planners, and the policymakers, so I’m really excited to start to get to know and make contacts throughout the University to form interdisciplinary teams.
Do you expect the focus of your work to be different at SPH?
At Columbia over the last 20 years, I was largely concerned with quantifying the impacts of things like air pollution and climate on adverse health effects and projecting them into the future—how bad is it going to be in 2050? I feel like we now understand that pretty well, and now I’m much more focused on what we can do. It’s more of an action orientation, less epidemiology and more policy-relevant science. It seems consistent with what’s needed, and also what other people around here are interested in.
Is it challenging to shift to policy-oriented research?
Oh definitely. It’s also going out of the comfort zone, for me at least as an epidemiologist. Epidemiology is a challenging but well-defined world, and you can do your work on your computer and get your data and write papers and move on to the next dataset, but the action orientation requires talking to stakeholders, to communities and corporations, and people who understand the urban environment, and then working with them to jointly develop solutions and implement them. It’s messy, but urgently needed.