Noam Unger, CSIS: The urgency of health adaptation? “It’s self-evident but requires massive changes.”

The CommonHealth

In our ongoing series on climate and health, we had the great fortune to enlist a friend and colleague, Noam Unger, Director of the CSIS Sustainable Development and Resilience Initiative, to discuss PREPARE, the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience. Why did it take so long for adaptation to rise in significance? PREPARE is “a presidential initiative that is not coming with a big bag of money along with it,” which means its principal focus is coordination around food, water, health, infrastructure, data forecasting, and financing and insurance. What might that achieve? Is it meaningful to compare its prospects with those of PEPFAR? How to build a geostrategic rationale, a program framework, and a mixed constituency for PREPARE incrementally over time? Give a listen to the answers to these questions and more.