Issue link: https://hi.iaq.net/i/191637
Climate Change, the Indoor Environment, and Health Summary Climate change1 poses "a significant long-term challenge for the United States" (NRC, 2010b). Its potential effects on public health have been addressed in major research efforts conducted under the auspices of the federal US Global Change Research Program and the National Center for Environmental Health, the congressionally mandated National Academy of Sciences' America's Climate Choices study initiative, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization. A search of the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed database in late February 2011 yielded nearly 1,500 papers on the topics of climate change or global warming and health. In all that work, one issue has been given relatively little attention: the effect of climate-change–induced alterations in the indoor environment on occupant health. At first impression, the lack of attention might seem reasonable. Buildings shelter occupants from the outdoors. A deeper examination, though, provides reasons to be concerned. People spend the vast majority of their time in indoor environments and will thus experience many of the effects of climate change indoors. The outdoor environment permeates indoors in all but maximum-containment laboratory conditions. A building that was tightly sealed as a response to adverse outdoor condi1 This report uses the term climate to refer to prevailing outdoor environmental conditions— temperature, humidity, wind, precipitation, sea level, and other phenomena—and climate change to refer to modifications in those outdoor conditions that occur over an extended period of time. 1 Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.