NEW YORK
“He still had to go to work and the rest of us had to figure out, you know, how do we make sure that we’ve got a shelter for tonight or where are we going to get food from?’” she said. Tafuna’i can spot these links between extreme weather events and disease, but actually treating the effects of rising temperatures on the Samoan population can be tricky. It’s exceedingly difficult to assess a sick patient and determine that climate change itself is the main driver of that patient’s illness, Tafuna’i said. What she does see, however, is that climate change compounds and exacerbates existing health inequities in Samoa.
“You can definitely see that climate change has a huge impact on health, but it wasn’t in our curriculum at the time, and it wasn’t something we spoke about,” Tafuna’i said. So she invited colleagues from other universities, along with climate and related experts, to come speak to her students about the crisis.