SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — The problems in public health and our food systems are exacerbated by and related to climate change — and they require interdisciplinary collaboration to solve.

That was the message at a talk about the intersection of all three subjects hosted by the University of Rhode Island last week.

The three speakers were all alumni of the SciComm Identities Project (SCIP), a program started by URI’s Metcalf Institute and Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism for academics from underrepresented races or ethnic backgrounds.

The theme of the 2025 SCIP had been food systems, Metcalf executive director Fara Warner explained. “The effects of climate on our food systems, and the reverse of that, which is also the impact of producing food for billions of people on the Earth, which also adds to global warming.”

Likewise, people’s health is impacted both by the food they eat and the environments they live and work in, according to Christine Ekenga, a professor at Emory University and a 2023 SCIP fellow.

As an epidemiologist, Ekenga studies the factors that go into disease risk, in particular the environmental factors. “So, the air we breathe, the water we drink and food we eat,” she said.

“What we know about these risk factors, and here in the U.S., is that in certain populations there’s differential exposures,” she said. Some populations are more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards while others are more likely to be exposed to environmental benefits.

That means that addressing health issues has to be tailored and targeted to those varying risk factors.

Cornell professor Roger Figueroa, a 2025 SCIP fellow who studies food and nutritional security, discussed how just having food available isn’t enough on its own to constitute security. The cultural and nutritional value of food is also important.

“Being able to produce and being able to make the food reach the people and have people actually support it and consume it,” he said. “Can we do that consistently?”

Climate change disrupts that in many ways, URI professor Ambarish Karmalkar said. As an academic who studies the physical science of climate change, “the main question that I try to answer is, how does global warming affect us locally?”

While humans have been able to adapt to changing weather patterns for thousands of years, the cumulative effects of the climate crisis and erratic weather patterns will cause disruptions in food production and delivery that could drive availability down and/or costs up.

Karmalkar uses both actual observations and modeling to document local climate change that he can then share with journalists and policymakers. Although following his time as a SCIP fellow in 2024, he’s changed how he shares information.

“As a climate scientist, I would produce climate data, climate projections, and hand over those projections to people who want to use them, but very quickly they realize that there’s a mismatch between what they actually want and what we are giving them,” he said.

Now he thinks about it more as a dialogue.

Part of the mission of the fellowship, like other programs run by the Metcalf Institute, is to bridge the communication gap between scientists and reporters.

The SCIP fellowship started in 2023 but was cut short this past calendar year because of the cancellation of National Science Foundation funding by the Trump administration. SCIP “doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s ideas,” Warner said.

All three speakers said SCIP was a chance to understand how to better communicate their work so that people can learn about it and use it, similarly to how the issues with food systems, public health, and climate change have to be solved between disciplines.

“As scientists, you know, we have this tendency to talk about all the gory details about experimental design and findings,” Figueroa said. “But that doesn’t really help when you are trying to communicate your science.”

Full disclosure: Colleen Cronin was a fellow at Metcalf’s 2024 Annual Science Immersion Workshop for Journalists.