Eranga Galappaththi
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Climate change rarely threatens health on its own. Extreme weather events often arrive alongside biodiversity loss, damaged land, food and nutrition insecurity, emerging diseases, and limited access to health care.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Earth & Environmental Science
Social Science
- Topics
climate change
climate and health
complex climate-health emergencies
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Document and monitor how complex climate-health emergencies form and change among local communities in Uganda, Sri Lanka, India, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina, using community-driven Observatories with real-time monitoring.
- Analyze how extreme climatic events and non-climatic stresses interact through food systems to affect health systems and people's lived experiences.
- Co-develop pilot interventions with communities that integrate different knowledge systems, and build an international knowledge-sharing network to guide health risk management policy.
More about the research
Together, these risks can overwhelm local health systems, creating what this project calls complex climate-health emergencies. Local and Indigenous communities often face these combined pressures most directly. This project asks how such emergencies form, change over time, and affect people's lives.
Why it matters
Communities facing extreme weather together with food insecurity and limited health care are especially vulnerable to health crises. By tracking how these emergencies unfold in six countries, this work could inform adaptation strategies, pilot interventions, and health risk management policies. These could help local and Indigenous communities and health systems in other climate-sensitive regions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Bruce Alexander
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build regional capacity for climate and health research by linking multidisciplinary expertise and institutional partnerships to questions that align with the stated priorities of American Indian and rural communities in the Upper Midwest.
Lani Tsinnajinnie
University of New Mexico, NM·Earth & Environmental Science
Work with Indigenous and rural communities in New Mexico and Oklahoma, through a co-production process, to identify information needs about the land-water-air system under extreme weather.
Vera Kuklina
University of Maryland, MD·Social Science
Identify and inventory the ice, snow and permafrost 'frozen commons' recognized by Indigenous and local communities and regional stakeholders, and describe how each is governed within its cultural setting.
The school
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 496 research doctorates a year.
More about Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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