What is the Environmental Health Action Committee?
The mission of the Environmental Health Action Committee is to establish, promote, and advance the voice and advocacy efforts of medical students fighting for solutions to climate change and the wide variety of environmental and health issues associated with climate change.
Our goals include:
- Expanding medical education to include the role of climate change in public health
- Advocating for legislation that promotes federal support to fight against climate change and to develop federal, state and local programs that promote environmental health and sustainability.
- Promoting individual and community based changes in daily life that improves environmental and personal health.
- Educating the public on the relation between environmental climate change and personal health by providing access to educational material and actionable activities.
Overall, as AMSA’s newest action committee, our overarching focus this year is to bring awareness to the concept of environmental justice and its impact on human health. At AMSA, we recognize that the effects of environmental health are pervasive as it relates to health disparities based in race, gender, national origin, or income. This year, especially, environmental injustices have been highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic with clear disparities in morbidity and mortality experienced by people of color. This is, of course, no coincidence.
