How Climate Affects Community Health

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

This animated video discusses how climate change is altering the environment and increasing disease risk from air pollution, spread of disease vectors, increased high temperatures, violent storms and flooding. Ideas for community preparedness are offered.

Click to View

Notes from our reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.

Potential use in a unit on how climate change is effecting the increase in community diseases and how communities can prepare for changes in our environment. Teachers can use this video as a launch point for discussing BRACE. BRACE is a five-step process that allows health officials in communities to develop strategies and programs to help their communities prepare for the health effects of climate change. There is a link to the CDC collection and resources, which offers a wide range of teaching tools, content pdfs, and related videos.
The video notes the Earth's climate is changing, and these changes are expected to cause increases in health risks induced by higher temperatures, unhealthy air quality and disease outbreaks, outcomes which are in line with peer-reviewed research. The video goes on to state there will be more frequent storms and flooding which is in line with predictions stated in the latest IPCC report. The video discusses adaptation strategies that can be used to reduce risk. The video mentions the Centers for Disease Control is working on resiliency to these risks with a climate ready initiative. For each of these risks the video elaborates on at-risk groups. Comments from expert scientist: There are several climate effects on human health mentioned. This a good resource as a high-level overview of the climate change effects on human health, but it does not dive into the climate changes themselves. It is not a bad thing, but this should be used in parallel with a more climate science-focused resource if the educational purpose is to learn about climate change AND human health.
The video's visualizations enhance the learning experience. Overall, this video covers a little about a lot of topics and may need to be watched multiple times to comprehend all of the content due to its high density of information. Because of this high density of information, it supports learning similar to a flash-card style rather then developing depth of knowledge or an understanding for a subject.