As the School’s new chair of the Department of Environmental Health, Kari Nadeau trains her expertise on finding solutions to climate-related health issues.
May 4, 2023–Working with farmworkers in California’s Central Valley for two decades, environmental health researcher Kari Nadeau noticed a disturbing trend. Pollen season kept coming earlier and earlier, and more and more people were suffering from acute allergies and asthma. “The season in California used to start in March, and now it starts in January,” she says. She started asking herself, “Why is this happening two months earlier? Why are plants emitting more pollen? Why are more people suffering?”
The answers were the same: climate change. Carbon dioxide is a stimulant for grasses and ragweed, causing them to emit more pollen even as the warming climate causes them to produce pollen earlier. At the same time, studies showed climate change was making wildfires more severe. “Central Valley was suffering from wildfire smoke about 100 days a year, while 20 years ago it was more like 20 days a year,” says Nadeau, at the time director of Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy & Asthma Research and Naddisy Foundation Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics. Air pollutants caused by the changing climate, she and colleagues found, were not only creating a public health crisis for farmworkers in the Central Valley but also for people in the Bay Area.
“People’s health is inextricably linked to the planet’s health,” Nadeau says. “Researchers have shown that heat stress, air pollution, extreme weather events, displacement, all increase not only acute but also chronic health outcomes. I wanted to expand my thinking towards solution-facing research with policy-related outcomes.”
She is doing just that as the new John Rock Professor of Climate and Population Studies and chair of the Department of Environmental Health
