What’s Needed?

We have a lot of work ahead. Our main goals are to learn more about climate change’s impact on our health and what we can do to protect ourselves. Looking ahead, here’s what’s most needed to keep these threats in check:

• We must continue to invest in disease surveillance systems so that we can track these diseases and see if they are increasing or shifting over time.
• We need to maintain a strong national public health system and workforce so that we can predict, prevent, detect, and respond to new diseases as they expand to new areas of the United States.
• We need new tools to help us analyze and interpret the data we collect and predict where threats are most likely to occur.
• We must understand inequities in how climate change impacts certain populations and use data to inform tailored prevention and response strategies for communities that are disproportionately affected.
• We need to invest in research, environmental data collection, and disease/climate modeling efforts that will help us predict and prepare for future climate scenarios that will impact disease outcomes.