Climate change is widely recognized by public health leaders as a tremendous threat to human health and well-being. As succinctly stated in 2015 by the prestigious Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change, “tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.”1 The American Public Health Association displayed leadership in addressing this challenge through its declaration of 2017 as the “Year of Climate Change and Health.”2 At the 2017 annual conference, Executive Director Georges Benjamin announced that “climate change is public health’s greatest challenge.”2 Leading public health researchers share this concern, as evidenced by a literature search (June 2018) using the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science search engine3 through the University of North Carolina at Charlotte library for the term climate change in the American Public Health Association’s flagship journal, AJPH, resulting in 528 entries. Just this April 2018, AJPH published a special supplement on climate change and environmental justice, which included six articles focusing on technical, political, and economic linkages between climate change and public health.4 Clearly, there is great unanimity among prominent researchers that the public health community plays an essential role in response to the changing global climate.
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