Lisa Patel
Executive Director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford School of Medicine, and practicing pediatric hospitalist. She is an environmental-health advocate focused on climate change’s effects on children and public health.
Phasing Out Fossil Fuels Delivers Immediate Public-Health Benefits
Edward Maibach argues that phasing out fossil fuels should be treated as an immediate public-health intervention, not only a response to future climate risks. Alongside pediatrician Lisa Patel, sanitation advocate Catherine Coleman Flowers and air-quality entrepreneur Darren Riley, he points to local benefits—from fewer asthma exposures near schools and in homes to safer water during floods—that can make decarbonization a more concrete policy choice.
Health Care’s Climate Push Moves From Pledges to Accountability
National Academy of Medicine president Victor Dzau and pediatrician Lisa Patel argue that health care’s climate responsibility extends beyond greener buildings to the disease burden, supply chains, procurement, care delivery and community resilience that determine the sector’s footprint. In this Aspen Ideas: Health discussion, they frame climate change as both a growing source of illness and a test of whether hospitals, clinicians and suppliers can make emissions accountability as routine as patient safety.