Energy, Environment and Health

Society's search for sustainable and renewable energy supplies stems from a number of concerns: dwindling supplies of fossil fuels; increased international competition for the supplies that remain; increasing prices; national security; and the effects of fossil fuel use on the quality of the environment - including the impact of climate change - and of the health of ecosystems and human populations. The Environment and Health network of faculty, students and staff examines all aspects of this last issue, considering how energy use affects the environment and health and how the environment itself may be part of the solution to locating sustainable and renewable energy supplies.

The work of the Environment and Health network centers around three areas of research, application and outreach:

Health Impacts of Energy: These researchers, spread across public health, medicine and the biological and ecological sciences, have developed a suite of tools to assess the human and ecological health impacts of energy use and the built environment, including the impacts of climate change. A prime example of this effort is the One Atmosphere project which provides facilities and computational methods to simulate the changing atmosphere under different patterns of energy use; to expose cell lines, whole animals and humans to the mixture of primary pollutants and their transformation products while studying the resulting health effects; and to follow these effects in populations using advanced epidemiological and toxicological methods. The Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma and Lung Biology, run in collaboration with the US Environmental Protection Agency and the UNC School of Medicine, provides much of the basic scientific data on health effects needed to design sustainable systems of material and energy use.

UNC-Chapel Hill is home to a variety of chambers, one of the few such installations available in the U.S., allowing simulation of essentially any atmosphere that might be created in communities under mixes of fuel sources. Exposures of cell lines and organisms can be conducted in these chambers under highly controlled conditions.

Energy and Climate Change: Climate change is the greatest threat to the environment and health from the traditional uses of carbon-based fuels. The Environment and Health researchers have responded by developing a suite of studies on the likely trajectories of climate change globally and locally, linking these studies to energy scenarios to understand how alternative energy systems would affect these trajectories. The research includes measuring the stability of the world's icecaps; unraveling the history and prehistory of atmospheric greenhouse gases; and advanced studies in computational science needed to predict the range of likely impacts of energy use on the global dynamics of surface water, atmosphere, oceans and plant life, drawing on the work of a wide array of faculty in the earth sciences: geology, marine sciences, environmental science, geography, ecology, applied math and computer science.

Carbon Capture, Storage and Sequestration: While the search is on for new energy sources, there is little doubt that fossil fuels will remain a significant part of the base load in the next several decades. It is essential, therefore, to find ways to use those fuels while reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide or its accumulation in the atmosphere. The Environment and Health researchers in ecology, biology, environmental science, geology, marine science and geography are exploring novel ways to capture carbon dioxide during energy production and store it in geological structures (under the land or the oceans), and studying the degree to which land use can influence the sequestration of carbon dioxide in plants.

From local to regional to global scales, the Environment and Health network can help you understand the impacts of different mixtures of energy sources on key indicators of environmental quality and the health of populations. When combined with the other three networks of the Energy and Environment program at Carolina, we offer the ability to identify sources of energy, assess the impacts of these sources, develop policies and other strategies needed to bring new sources on-line, and to provide on our campus a test-bed for the emerging technologies.