NRSC221/GEOG221 Environment and Health
Environments, both physical and social, are fundamentally implicated in the health of human populations. These environments are constantly in flux but the rapidity of change of two of these – the global climate and the urbanization of populations warrant special attention. A changing climate will likely bring increased frequency and duration of temperature extremes, exacerbated by the physical properties of urban environments (e.g., the urban heat island effect) and the concentration of atmospheric pollutants in urban landscapes. The diversity of populations concentrated within cities means that some groups are better equipped than others to ward off the health effects of environmental exposures. This course introduces physical and social environments as factors in the production of human health, with emphasis on the physical properties of the atmospheric environment as they interact with diverse human populations in urban settings. Students completing this course should have gained an appreciation of the merit of interdisciplinary approaches in understanding and remedying contemporary human health issues that have environmental etiologies.
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