Throughout his medical career, Dr. Arnab Ghosh has treated patients affected by a wide variety of climate disasters including burn victims affected by the 2009 bush fires in Australia, New Yorkers affected by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and patients struggling to access medical care in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017.
“It’s devastating to see personally,” said Ghosh, an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medicine and a Climate and Health Scholar with the National Institute of Health and National Institute of Aging. “It highlighted to me that there is something really wrong.”
Ghosh’s experiences got him thinking about how to protect people – and especially those most susceptible – from the health effects of climate change. He has dedicated his research to this topic.
“What’s the best way to care for people, especially the most vulnerable populations?” he said. “It’s inevitable that people who are older are more susceptible to climate change, especially those with mobility or cognitive issues. I want to understand the effects of climate change on older populations, and then start to intervene. Essentially, we want to be able to identify people at risk and build services to care for them.”
One measure that Ghosh has been working on so far: planting and caring for trees in urban environments to reduce heat-related illness.
Climate-amplified events affect health in two ways, Ghosh explained. Sudden catastrophic events lead to immediate injuries, like in the cases of the burn victims from the Australian wildfires. These events also lead to more chronic health problems in vulnerable populations. For example, when a hurricane destroys a community, access to health services can be limited to non-existent for months. And extreme heat can lead to serious health consequences and even death, especially among older adults.
“How do you mitigate these chronic effects? That’s where the trees may help,” he said. “Trees improve the environment, they make people feel safter, they encourage people to go outside, which improves cardiovascular health. Their canopies provide shade moisture to the air, which cools local environments. They also improve air quality and reduce stormwater runoff.”
Ghosh’s research seeks to measure these benefits. “We want to be able to say, from a health care perspective, that planting trees can reduce the risk of dying or going to the emergency room,” he said.
He is currently working on several studies that quantify the health benefits of planting trees in New York City. That involves working with plant ecologists and climatologists from the U.S. Forest Service and with New York City officials from the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Urban and City Planning. He is also working with community members to get their input on tree-planting projects.
The research is important to quantify the health-related benefits of urban forestation projects, Ghosh explained. “This is an attempt to bring nature-based solutions into the economic framework,” he said. “By quantifying the health benefits of planting trees, we can use that data to inform nature-based capital assessments. This can help influence where we should allocate resources earmarked to address climate change, particularly in terms of resilience efforts.”
Planting trees is also a climate justice issue, Ghosh said.
“For lower income communities, air conditioning is expensive,” he said. “Unfortunately, some people may need to make a decision of whether they want to eat or turn on their AC. Cooling centers aren’t as accessible as they could be, especially for people who are mobility challenged, and there is a stigma attached to them. Planting and maintaining trees is our attempt at addressing this issue sustainably.
“How can this climate resilience work be channeled to better serve the communities most at risk?” he said. “Science is a slow endeavor, but we don’t have a lot of time. In this case, there’s a little bit of needing to build the airplane while we’re flying it. The real policy questions our research is designed to help with is, where should we spend our money, and how many lives can we save?”