This week on the show, we're sharing an interview which is part of rabble's summer Boiling Point series. The Boiling Point examines the ways increasingly high temperatures due to the climate crisis are affecting our summers in Canada on a social, institutional, and ecological level.
Today, national politics reporter Stephen Wentzell speaks to Dr. Melissa Lem to talk about how the recent wildfires, heat domes, and record-breaking hot temperatures are affecting the physical and mental health of Canadians.
A clinic assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Lem also serves as the President-Elect for the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (or CAPE). Lem first became a member of CAPE when she was still in medical school. Since then, she has worked on policy and advocacy campaigns around the climate crisis, including wildfires, active transportation, and the need to connect to nature for health.
She and Wentzell dive into how climate change is a health issue and why it's so important for governments, at all levels, to put policies in place to protect people during extreme weather events.
"If, as physicians [and] healthcare workers, we want to make sure that our patients have the best health status, we have to start looking beyond our offices and our hospitals," she explained. "We have to start looking at social determinants of health and ecological determinants of health, like making sure we have clean air to breathe, healthy temperatures, and have green space and trees to shade us and cool our cities to keep us healthy." - Dr. Lem.
Read Wentzell's full article on this subject here.
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Photo credit: Landon Parenteau