The following excerpt is taken from an article written by Vann R. Newkirk II in the Dec. 2018 issue of The Atlantic. Read the full article here.

“Experts say mounting environmental pressures will make people sicker, and that the health-care system will play a major role in averting disaster.”

A major report published November 28 in the public-health journal The Lancet provides predictions of how climate change is degrading human health, and how it will alter health-care systems in the future. The findings are reliably grim. But in focusing on the health-care implications and the potential damage done to people and their descendants, the report provides a firm backing to the call to climate action. The experts behind the report hope to marry the urgency of climate science with the muscle of America’s most successful and most trusted policy experiment—its public-health system.