NJ Research Institutions Host Symposium to Tackle Climate Change and Planetary, Human Health
New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers, Princeton and Stevens Institute of Technology joined to present respective research projects and explore potential areas of collaboration related to climate change, planetary and human health that would benefit the population of New Jersey and beyond.
Environmental scientists, engineers, experts and government officials were invited to present and speak on a wide variety of subjects related to climate change ranging from nuclear winter and flood mitigation, to measuring community resilience and nanotechnology strategies for agriculture. Also in attendance were representatives from the New Jersey Departments of Environmental Protection and Transportation, the New Jersey Commission on Science, Innovation and Technology, Connecticut Agricultural Center and the National Science Foundation.
The World Health Organization has declared climate change as the single biggest health threat facing humanity.
“Today’s focus will be addressing the most urgent and critically important topic of our time: Ensuring planetary and human health for generations to come by taking immediate and meaningful actions to combat climate change,” said Dr. Brian Strong, chancellor of Biomedical and Health Sciences and the executive vice president for health affairs at Rutgers University in his opening remarks. “The World Health Organization has declared climate change as the single biggest health threat facing humanity.”
While public awareness around how climate change affects human health exists, most discussions focus on health outcomes as a result from natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires. Though large-scale events have detrimental effects, it’s the extreme heat, poor air and water quality, flooding, contaminated-water-related infections, access to healthcare and other everyday effects of climate change that have the biggest impact on health, said Dr. Strong.
NJIT had a profound presence at the symposium with more than 40 from the university attending and many providing their expertise as panel moderators, session speakers and through expert commentary.
Wunmi Sadik, distinguished professor and chair of NJIT’s chemistry and environmental science department, was a co-chair and moderator of the State of Science session, which introduced a panel of experts on global and local climate science, impacts on flooding to environments and ecosystem interactions and resilience. Sadik is also the Director of the NJIT’s BioSMART Center, and her research focuses on developing innovative technologies for improving human health, food safety and the environment.
“One of the objectives of this symposium is for us to get to know better what is going on in each of our institutions and how we can better collaborate and address these questions,” Sadik said.
Featured on this panel was Michel Boufadel, distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering at NJIT. His presentation focused on his research of developing an actionable metric for measuring resilience — the Community Intrinsic Resilience Index (CIRI).
CIRI captures information from five critical sectors: energy, natural environment, public health, socio-economic and transportation. In essence, CIRI combines information from infrastructure and the social weave of communities and provides a numerical value for decision makers. The index can be calculated through an online mapping tool, based on geographic information system (GIS) technologies, for any area.
“Resilience metrics need to be adopted — decision-makers need numbers, politicians need numbers,” he noted, adding that “resilience may be opposite to sustainability. Resilience doesn’t necessarily mean the answer is sustainable. In other words, resilience relies on redundancy, but there has to be a balance.”
Wen Zhang, associate professor of environmental engineering at NJIT and leads the Sustainable Environmental Nanotechnology and Nanointerfaces Laboratory, presented his research that focuses on the use of nanotechnology for applications to increase sustainability and efficiency in agriculture and food industries.
One area of Zhang’s lab studies irrigation with gaseous nanobubble-containing water. The nanobubble water has been demonstrated to promote seed germination and plant growth. His lab tested different gasses such as oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide and air. Exposure to different gasses in nanobubble forms resulted in different influences on the soil pH, dissolved oxygen, redox potential and nutrient release from the irrigated soil.
His lab has also published findings on wastewater reuse through electrochemical processes. Upcycling nitrogen into ammonia fertilizer is a promising yet challenging topic in resource recovery. Using an electrified membrane made of copper oxide foam and a polytetrafluoroethylene membrane, his lab presents a process for turning nitrate to ammonia and ultimately into a liquid, ready-to-use fertilizer.
Zeyuan Qiu, professor of environmental science and policy, presented his pursuit of understanding the compounding impacts of climate change, environmental pollution and socioeconomic vulnerability on human outcomes through a systems way of thinking and a multilevel assessment approach.
“Human health is constantly being shaped by the entire ecological system around it,” said Qiu. “Climate change exacerbates the environmental and socioeconomic determinants of health, which hurts the overburdened communities the most."
Qiu’s research characterizes the health outcomes as both diagnosed diseases and undiagnosed health systems and pursues a holistic approach to understand the health impacts of climate change. A part of the research relies on a community survey to understand residents' perception of environment and climate, and health symptoms and outcomes. His interdisciplinary research team is currently conducting the survey in the City of Camden, New Jersey, noting the overwhelming presence of health symptoms among the residents and individuals’ frustration to mitigate the impacts. He also noted the enthusiasm of community residents to participate and give detailed feedback.
“The survey questionnaire is 49-page long. Believe it or not, they are very dedicated to doing that.”
Qiu hopes the survey results will help establish a baseline of health symptoms and outcomes for the community and direct evidence-based healthcare services to mitigate health impacts of climate change and reduce health disparities.
Also presenting their research from NJIT:
- Genoa Warner, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science, leads the Laboratory of Endocrine Disruption & Chemical Biology (EDC Lab)
- Mengyan Li, associate professor of chemistry and environmental science, leads the Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnology Lab
- Lijie Zhang, assistant professor of chemistry and environmental science, leads the Environmental Biogeochemical Processes Lab
A keynote presentation by the National Science Foundation’s Dr. Wendy Nilson, program director for the Smart and Connected Health Program, emphasized the system’s approach to addressing climate change.
Furthering the opportunity for research in sustainability, graduate and postdoctoral students in attendance asked questions and networked with their peers and other researchers with the promise of further collaboration, grant proposals and publications to address the issues of climate change and human health.
