In this episode we discuss ethics and morality in the context of climate change and public health including geopolitical challenges, temporal justice, indigenous voices, and ways to make an impact.

Our guest Prof Ans Irfan is a multidisciplinary global public health expert with over a decade and a half of experience as a health equity strategist, serving on the faculty of Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. As a scholar-practitioner, he has worked across cultures, continents, and countries, including Pakistan, China, and the United States, since the early 2000s. He is currently based at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, where he explores the complex intersection of religious moral philosophy, social ethics, and public health policies, focusing on conceptualizing religion as a structural determinant of health and its implications for public health and climate action. In addition, he is also affiliated with the Harvard Innovation Labs at Harvard Business School along with Harvard Climate Entrepreneurs’ Circle. He holds a Doctor of Medicine, a Doctor of Public Health in climate-resilient health systems, a Doctor of Education in higher education administration, and a Doctor of Science in information technology and climate innovation.

Our interviewer Dorothy Lsoto is a graduate student pursuing her Ph.D. in Environment and Resources at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds an MS. Environment and Resources with a graduate certificate in Energy Analysis and Policy from UW-Madison. At the Nelson Institute, Dorothy lectures an undergraduate capstone course that she designed on Air Quality, and Equity in an African city with a focus on Kampala. Her doctoral research examines the persistent colonial city design of Kampala on its air quality and health. She studied Environment Management for her bachelors at Makerere University, Kampala. It is from here that she worked with renewable energy technologies and air quality in East Africa for over a decade.

Episode notes and references:

Music by: Ritesh Prasanna

Audio editing and transcripts by: Paras Singh and Raag Sethi

Podcast website: https://atmospherictales.com

Transcript:

AI: Ans Irfan (Guest)

DL: Dorothy Lsoto (Interviewer)

SG: Shahzad Gani (Host)

SG: I’m your host, Shahzad Gani, and welcome to another episode of Atmospheric Tales. Our guest today is a multidisciplinary global health expert with over a decade and a half experience as a health equity strategist, serving on the faculty of Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. As a scholar-practitioner, he has worked across cultures, continents, and countries, including Pakistan, China, and the United States, since the early 2000s. He is currently based at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, where he explores the complex intersection of religious moral philosophy, social ethics, and public health policies, focusing on conceptualizing religion as a structural determinant of health and its implications for public health and climate action. In addition, he is also affiliated with the Harvard Innovation Labs at Harvard Business School along with Harvard Climate Entrepreneurs’ Circle. He holds a Doctor of Medicine, a Doctor of Public Health in climate-resilient health systems, a Doctor of Education in higher education administration, and a Doctor of Science in information technology and climate innovation. I’m excited to welcome our guest, Prof. Ans Irfan. Our interviewer Dorothy Lsoto is a graduate student pursuing her Ph.D. in Environment and Resources at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds an MS. Environment and Resources with a graduate certificate in Energy Analysis and Policy from UW-Madison. At the Nelson Institute, Dorothy lectures an undergraduate capstone course that she designed on Air Quality, and Equity in an African city with a focus on Kampala. Her doctoral research examines the persistent colonial city design of Kampala on its air quality and health. She studied Environment Management for her Bachelor’s at Makerere University, Kampala. It’s from here that she worked with renewable energy technologies and air quality in East Africa for over a decade. Welcome to the show, Ans and Dorothy!

DL: Thank you, Shahzad, and welcome, listeners! Today, we have Ans, as you’ve heard from Shahzad, and we’re going to dive into our conversation today, which is very exciting. We’re talking about climate change, ethics and morality. So just to get right into this conversation—climate change now more than ever, is getting most people’s attention. We have witnessed increasingly extreme weather events around the world, including prolonged drought and flood events which threaten agriculture production, warmer ocean temperatures that usher in more powerful tropical storms, and decimate aquatic biodiversity. And this year, actually, Canadian fires blanketed the northern portions of the United States in particulate matter and ozone. And even as I speak today, as we speak today, we still have an air quality alert that is going on and, so that’s one of the issues we’re faced with right now in, at least in Madison, Wisconsin. All of these symptoms of climate change impact public health, and these impacts are often not equally felt around the world. And according to experts like yourself, the lives of people living in more developed countries and the consumption of those nations at large, are primarily responsible for climate change. And yet people living in the Global North will not feel the impacts of climate change as immediately, or as significantly as developing nations in the Global South, whose contribution to the problem is really minimal. And to explore this topic more deeply, I would like to ask you just a few questions about the historical and political background of climate change and public health, and how these issues are manifesting in the present, what we’ll likely be grappling with in the future, within the context of ethics and morality. So, according to the American Public Health Association, or APHA, climate change poses a major threat to human health; so, Ans, how would you define human ethics and morality in the context of climate change and public health?

AI: Hi, Dorothy, so wonderful to be here! I generally resist sort of like, defining things because I think they restrain our imagination, but it’s kind of, I think, you already alluded to it, in terms of like, both the power differentials, as well as our duty to do what is right, right? So I could sort of like, you know, comment on, in these like broad philosophical terms, in terms of like, you know, what is just and right, which really kind of boils down to, from a both moral and practical responsibility, to mitigate climate change and work towards a future where we’re actively adapting to the changing climate, right? So, it’s about how do you reduce climate change impacts, but also how do you advocate for those policies to make sure people who are most socially vulnerable both within these countries, or so called Global North, but specifically in the Global South as well. But what I will say is that, you know, we need to avoid the temptation of, you know, just sticking with these definitions, and just taking those without scrutinizing these, which is all to say that we need to scrutinize those terms such as like, you know, what is fair? And what is morally right, right? So, because science cannot answer those questions, those are questions that are going to come from ethics, they’re going to come from morality, and philosophy, and so on, so forth. And we have this colonial tendency, particularly in the Global North, where we use this vague colonial language, without scrutinizing those terms in a meaningful way. So my invitation has always been to, you know, fellow colleagues, academics, practitioners within climate change sphere, that whenever folks, especially those in a decision-making capacity are talking about, you know, that climate morality and ethics is about fairness and justice, like, what did they mean by that, right? What sort of actions does that lead to, right? So because like end of the day, what we need to keep in mind is that, you know, there are a couple of these, just really egregious statistics that are like, top 1% of the richest people in the entire globe consume more resources than the poorest half of the entire humanity, or like, you know, world’s top 10% richest people, they cause about half of global emissions,...

Ethics and morality in the context of climate change