Description:

Impacts of extreme weather on mental health:

This session will cover topics on how a range of extreme weather events impact mental health outcomes among individuals and communities. Extreme events will specifically address, but need not be limited to, drought and heatwaves. Emphasis will be given to understanding the pathways between the occurrence of extreme events and mental health endpoints that could foster greater collaborations in the design of interventions to reduce these impacts.

Advances in infectious disease predictions and pandemic preparedness and prevention including COVID-19:

As the world deals with an emergency response to flatten the epidemic curve and save lives threatened by COVID-19, it has become clear that nearly every discipline plays an important role in managing public health threats. The climate, weather, and social science communities are no exception to this, and fortunately have been working together for decades to understand how advances in climate modeling and forecasting can support improvements in infectious disease predictions and to inform early warning and early action to manage infectious disease risk and to mitigate impacts.   This interdisciplinary three-way joint session between CVC, E&H and Societal Applications seeks abstracts that highlight advances in infectious disease predictions and pandemic preparedness and prevention from a variety of disciplines including epidemiology, social science research, climate modeling, predictions and projections, and those with innovative policy approaches.  We invite abstracts from all disciplines that highlight important developments in climate modeling and predictions as they relate to infectious disease predictions within sociocultural and population contexts, taking into account policy assessments that address preparedness and prevention of disease outbreaks.  We seek to understand: How is environmental and health information being collected and modeled? How climate and health modeling and prediction can inform planning, preparedness, and mitigation? How can we anticipate and better prepare to address questions pertaining to the seasonality or environmental sensitivity of infectious agents, and management of epidemics? What social, cultural, and population dynamics account for individual and community vulnerability and resilience? What local, state, and national policies currently facilitate preparedness or need change to curtail propagation of or mortality from infectious disease? What lessons can we learn from 2020 to get ahead of the epidemic curve to facilitate early action for any future pandemics in a less socially and economically detrimental way?