Modeling the Health Impacts of Climate Change in the United States

Climate change threatens human health and well-being in the United States. There is growing interest in quantitative projections of health impacts of climate change, and a number of tools to investigate these impacts have been developed or refined in the past few years. Several groups recently analyzed impacts across a range of climate and health areas with the goal of producing estimates that were as quantitative and consistent as possible. This presentation addresses various cross-cutting issues involved in these analyses, such as the choice of end-point metrics, challenges in creating consistency across studies, and how these studies can inform future decisions, planning, and research. An overview of the results from three of the modeling studies is presented. The first study examines the impacts of climate change on ozone and mortality in the United States. The second study projects the impacts of climate change on indoor air quality in nine U.S. cities based on changes in the rate of air exchange between indoor and outdoor environments. The third study models the impacts of climate change on the timing of the onset week of Lyme disease. These three studies, along with quantitative projections of heat-related mortality and waterborne disease (see separate abstracts), are highlighted in the upcoming USGCRP report: Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment.