Climate change presents new challenges to human health. As temperatures rise, tropical and sub-tropical diseases are already becoming more widespread. While climate change has consequences on human health, engaging with the natural world can also have benefits for physical and mental health. But, how do we best communicate and explain these issues and the choices we face. Des Fitzgerald talks to Samantha Walton and Christopher Sanders about their research and discuss the challenges the climate and nature emergency presents to human health, and how we might respond.

Dr Christopher Sanders is a Fellow in Entomology, Epidemiology and Virology at the Pirbright Institute funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), which is part of UK Research and Innovation. His research focuses on the physiological and behavioural attributes that enable an insect species to transmit a pathogen. Since 2006, his work has explored the behaviour of Culicoides biting midges, a type of small insect which has the potential to be transported over long distances on prevailing winds, carrying viruses with it.

Dr Samantha Walton is a poet and Reader in Modern Literature at Bath Spa University. Her research explores psychology and environmentalism; experimental poetics, fiction of the 1920s-30s; and the Scottish novelist and nature writer, Nan Shepherd. Walton is the author of The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought, and the forthcoming Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure. Between 2016-2018, Walton was an Early Career Leadership Fellow working on the AHRC-funded project, Cultures of Nature and Wellbeing: Connecting Health and the Environment through Literature. This project involved working with environment and health policymakers and wellbeing practitioners, and original research into what literature tells us about our emotional and ethical entanglements with the living world. You can read more about the project here: https://culturenaturewellbeing.wordpress.com

Professor Des Fitzgerald is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Exeter.

You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Des Fitzgerald and Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to soil and sustainable transport.

The podcasts are all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on festivals, rivers, eco-criticism and the weather. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2

For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit: https://www.ukri.org/our-work/responding-to-climate-change/ or follow @ahrcpress on twitter. To join the discussion about the research covered in this podcast and the series please use the hashtag #GreenThinkingPodcast.

Producer: Ruth Watts