Alan Dangour, Director of Climate and Health at Wellcome, is working to highlight the profound links between climate change and human health, moving beyond traditional climate metrics to focus on lives at risk. Wellcome’s Climate and Health program aims to strengthen the evidence base on climate-sensitive health issues, such as heatwaves and the spread of infectious diseases, while translating research into practical, policy-driven solutions. Dangour emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers, policymakers, and communities to develop real-world interventions, such as cooling strategies during extreme heat and addressing maternal health risks. Wellcome seeks to leverage technology, such as AI, to enhance research dissemination and build a thriving, global field of climate and health research, ensuring health is central to climate action policies. The notion that climate change poses a significant health risk is not as widely acknowledged as it should be. Yet the relationship between a warming planet and human well-being is profound, with impacts ranging from heat waves to the spread of infectious diseases. Alan Dangour, Director of Climate and Health at Wellcome, is determined to change that. “Developing evidence-based solutions to the damage to our health done by climate change is genuinely vital,” Dangour told Mongabay during a recent exchange with Matthew Boyer, reflecting his mission to place health at the center of climate action. Dangour’s journey at the nexus of human well-being and the environment began well before joining Wellcome in January 2022. As a Professor of Food and Nutrition for Global Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, he dedicated years to studying the intersections of environmental change, food systems, and public health. His time in academia highlighted the increasing toll that climate change was taking on health, a theme that has only grown more pressing. Today, at the helm of […]