Principles of health, public health, and climate change

This chapter provides an overview of the common concepts and frameworks in health, public health, and climate changes. These key theoretical principles in multiple academic disciplines may help readers and researchers to conceptualise the health implications of climate change as discussed later in this book. This chapter provides an overview of the common theoretical concepts in health, public health, and climate change. It highlights how the health implication of climate change might be conceptualised and potentially examined systematically. The chapter introduces the key concepts and principles in health, public health, and basic climate change science. Public health as a science-based academic/subject discipline is grounded with methodological branches such as epidemiology, biostatistics, law, and ethics, and research approaches such as clinical trials. Measuring health effects of a condition/context on a person or in a community requires the quantification of relationship between health outcome severity and the proportion of the population experiencing the effect/impact. Air quality affects human health. Climate change and air pollution interaction influences human health outcomes in a complex manner. Health impacts of climate change may manifest differently among regions and population subgroups.