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Climate change: ​

What’s genetics got to do with it?​

Genetic technologies are being developed to contribute to solving the climate crises. ​

The technological approaches fall into three broad action areas:​

• Mitigation (examples: carbon capture)​
• Adaptation (examples: climate resilient crops, preventing spread of infectious disease)​
• Monitoring and understanding change (examples: genomic changes, biodiversity changes)​

Genetics is one of many contributors to these three action areas. Genetics alone will not solve the climate crises.​

What do we mean by climate crises?​

Have you noticed the weather has changed in your lifetime or do you hear elders refer to changes they’ve observed?​

Climate crises refer to the myriad of problems that result from human-caused changes to Earth’s atmosphere that outpace the natural ability of life on our planet to adapt.​

More frequent, severe, and/or erratic weather patterns and natural disasters (hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, extreme and unseasonable high and low temperatures, etc.) are negatively impacting humans and other life on our planet. These changes to the physical world will continue to worsen if we are unable to change our atmosphere by reducing carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases that cause overall warming on our planet at a faster rate than natural cycles.​

The impacts on the physical world create changes in our social world (refugees, mass migration events, conflict, etc.), so we include these as part of the climate crises.​

We use ‘climate crises’ to help us remember that there are myriad issues at play every time we speak about climate change and how to repair the planet and sustain life going forward.​

What are some areas of life and society that are already being particularly impacted by the climate crises?​

Here’s just a few impacted areas that we Americans say we care deeply about​

   Agriculture​

   National and international security​

   Public health and infectious disease​

   Sports and outdoor activities​

   Travel and tourism​

What can I do?​

Your actions matter. If you are reading this, you are getting informed. If you then talk to at least one other person about something you have learned, you are making a difference. If you regularly connect with people in your life and work to talk about how the climate crises are impacting the folks in your life, the difference you are making is multiplied. Here are some ideas for other individual actions you can take [link to action resource list]. Ultimately, collective action is needed to address the scale and interrelatedness of the climate crises, so talk to your local, state, and national policy makers and let them know you want them to prioritize policy solutions to the climate crises.