Dr Aaron Bernstein

Recent Speaker

April 13, 2010

By mid-century, climate change and a massive human population, which will peak at 9 billion people, will conspire to exert a tremendous strain upon the planet.

While our species may squeeze through this population-climate bottleneck, others may not. The only truly irreversible consequence of environmental degradation, whatever the cause, is a loss of biological diversity, namely the variety of life on Earth. Once a gene, species or ecosystem disappears, it is gone forever. Biodiversity loss is occurring today at a rate not seen since 65 million years ago when Earth's last great extinction event transpired. At that time, half of all species went extinct. Conservative estimates suggest that climate change alone may cause the extinctions of one third of all species by 2050.

In 2002, the international community, led by the United Nations set out to halt biodiversity loss by 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity. Now at 2010, biodiversity loss persists unabated. While many such banners have been raised to signal the relevance of the biodiversity crisis, the issue has received relatively little attention from the press and is generally poorly understood by the public. This state of affairs exists despite scientific evidence that a world with too little biodiversity is one that needlessly imperils our health. A fraying of the web of life, a web in which humans evolved, has serious consequences for our well being. Some of these, such as the emergence of new infectious diseases, have become increasingly apparent in recent years.

If we are to ensure the health of humanity today and especially beyond the mid-century bottleneck, we must do everything possible to reverse the troubling decline in biodiversity.

Dr Aaron Bernstein’s speaking tour has been made possible thanks to the Thomas Foundation Conservation Oration presented in partnership with The Nature Conservancy.

Aaron Bernstein, MD, MPH, is on faculty at Harvard Medical School and the Center for Health and the Global Environment. His work examines the human health dimensions of global environmental change, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, with the aim of promoting a deeper understanding of these subjects among policy makers, educators, and the public.
 
Along with Nobel Peace Prize recipient Eric Chivian, he co-authored the Oxford University Press book Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity. The book has been widely acclaimed, including by Al Gore, Kofi Annan, and Gro Brundtland, and was named the best biology book of 2008 by the Library Journal.
 
Dr. Bernstein is a past recipient of a Harvard University Zuckerman Fellowship (2008) and has received Stanford University’s Firestone Medal for Research. In 2009 he became the course director for Human Health and Global Environmental Change, offered jointly at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, the only such course offered at a medical school in the United States. He received his AB from Stanford University, his medical degree from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and his MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed his medical training in the Boston Combined Residency in Pediatrics and now practices pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston.