By Maryn McKenna
A long-planned summit on climate change and health that was abruptly canceled last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) got a second chance at life in Atlanta yesterday. Detached from the federal agency and cut to a third of its originally intended length, the resurrected conference likely earned much more attention than it otherwise would have.
The renamed Climate and Health Meeting took place a few kilometers from the CDC at the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization founded by former president Jimmy Carter, thanks to a rescue mission by former vice president Al Gore, who was scheduled to be one of the original meeting’s keynote speakers.
The CDC canceled the original conference just as President Donald Trump’s new administration took office. When the decision became public, Gore mobilized the nonprofit he founded, the Climate Reality Project, along with a slate of other climate-concerned organizations including University of Washington's Center for Health and the Global Environment.
The revived 1-day meeting retained the basic objective of the 3-day original—to examine ways in which altered climatic conditions impinge on human health or are expected to do so—but not the original’s broad slate of abstracts about specific effects of climate change on pathogens, chronic health conditions, public safety, and food.
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