Climate Change and Public Health Emergencies

The team works closely with at-risk populations to study the impact of extreme weather events and the changing climate on lives and livelihoods around the world. In collaboration with women workers from India’s informal labor economy, the team is quantifying the impact of heat and humidity on human health and wages and co-creating toolkits with these communities to measure the efficacy of proposed adaptation interventions. Their policy and education work spans global audiences.

The team at the South Asia Climate Adaptation Cluster is the inaugural recipient of Harvard’s university-wide Salata Institute Climate Cluster grant.

Dr. Balsari directs Harvard’s tri-institute Climate and Human Health physician fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, C-Change, and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights.

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Disasters disrupt the lives and livelihoods of people as they are forcibly displaced, their built environment destroyed, and their social networks upended. The team studies the impact of disasters on morbidity, mortality, health service delivery, employment and education, through field-investigations and large population-based surveys. They combine primary data with novel data streams including human mobility data inferred from cell phones, and remotely-sensed data generated by satellites.

Their hallmark study, the impact of Hurricane Maria on Mortality in Puerto Rico, resulted in a drastic revision of the official mortality estimates and in underscoring excess mortality estimation as an important tool in assessing direct and indirect deaths from disasters.

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Twenty-first century technological advances in mobile and cloud-based computing, remote sensing, machine learning, and data accessibility present a range of novel data streams on clinical and population health, human mobility patterns, habitat and infrastructure, and the environment— in near real-time. The team uses these data to advance evidence-based decision-making in public health emergencies through research, training, and translational interventions.

Their successful initiatives include cloud-based disease surveillance systems at the world’s largest mass gatherings, evaluation of the world’s largest NCD screening and management program, digital health innovation labs, and policy outputs — including the India Digital Health Network’s White Paper on its Healthcare Professionals Registry — that have helped shape national digital health architectures.

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The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the low trust in expert scientific opinion in many communities around the world. In our commitment to bridging information asymmetries, we engage with a range of public communication tools that have included frequent op-eds, podcasts, and informational webinars.

In 2024, we launched Hum Sab Ek, a traveling multimedia exhibition curated in close collaboration with women workers from India’s informal labor economy. We work with students from the medical sciences, government, engineering, and design.

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Cyclone Amphan in 2020 laid bear the impacts of cyclones on coastal communities throughout the global south. The Sundarbans is a UNESCO heritage site, home to wildlife and mangrove trees, which sequester significantly more CO2 than other trees, and provide a physical barrier to on shore flooding. Near 50% of the people who live in the Indian Sundarbans live below the poverty line, and recurrent cyclones poses a threat to health, education, gender equity, displacement, nutrition, and livelihoods. Dr. Basu is working with local NGOs and stakeholders to describe the impacts of these extreme weather events on the community and to develop community interventions to respond.

Dr. Basu has leadership roles on 2 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. On a p20 NIH grant, he is the community engagement core lead of the Center for Climate: Equitable and Accessible Research-based Testing for Health (C-EARTH) initiative, that tests solutions to extreme heat in Boston, Madagascar, South Africa, and Burkina Faso. He is also the resource function co-lead for the NIH funded resource coordination center, where he provides resources and trainings on research translation for public health practitioners responding to the impacts of weather on health.

Dr. Basu is the faculty director of the HMS climate change, environment, and health curricular theme. This is a competency based, longitudinal curriculum that has been integrated into each pre-clerkship course at HMS. Students also interface with the curriculum during clerkships, and can take EH207 “Climate change and global health equity.”

Dr. Basu co-leads the Harvard Chan School’s climate change and planetary health interdisciplinary concentration with Professor Christopher Golden. He also co-leads the Global Community Organizing and Advocacy for Climate and Health (Global COACH) program, a novel program that teaches advocacy skills to health professionals addressing climate change around the world. The launch of this program will take place in Greece in Spring 2026.

Dr. Basu has held numerous policy oriented roles including:

• Board, Environmental League of Massachusetts

• Implementation Advisory Committee, Massachusetts Governor’s Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs

• Climate Science Advisory Panel, Massachusetts Governor’s Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs

• City of Cambridge Mayor’s Climate Crisis Working Group

• City of Cambridge Net Zero Task Force