Climate and Health Stories: Tess Konen

Meet Tess Konen.

Tess an environmental epidemiologist with the Minnesota Environmental Public Health Tracking Program. She helps provide useful data to local public health and researchers to better understand how our health and environment are intertwined.

What most excites you about your work?

Tess: I work on a range of topics, such as diseases spread by ticks and mosquitoes, pollen, and heat-related illness, which are all impacted by climate change. By working across so many areas, I can see the broader impact of climate change on health. I enjoy digging into the data to get a better understanding of the populations impacted to help inform prevention messaging. For example, our heat messaging often focuses on protective steps for the very young and very old, but our recent Minnesota and Wisconsin heat vulnerability project helped highlight that males and those aged 15-34 years are also at a greater risk for emergency department visits due to heat. This finding allows us to proactively protect at-risk populations with our prevention messaging.

How is your program preparing for and/or responding to climate changes in Minnesota?

Tess: Our program develops and maintains climate-related indicators. Over the last few years, we have added data for pollen and heat-related illness to the MN Public Health Data Access Portal. Annual surveillance of these data allow us to see the changes in numbers and rates over the years and provides a picture of who is impacted.

Why do you think it’s important for MDH to be working on this issue?

Tess: The impact of climate change on health makes this issue personal to people. While broad environmental changes are hard to comprehend, people understand that the pollen season is lengthening and their allergies are occurring sooner and lasting longer. It’s necessary to consider health in planning for climate changes.

How has climate change impacted your life personally?

Tess: Since climate change is over many, many years, it’s hard to say if I can see that impact or not. I have noticed winters with a lot less snow, which has meant a lot fewer days that I can go cross-country skiing. The weather has also seemed to be much more variable with a blizzard and 70 degree weather all occurring in the same week; I have learned to be adaptable and also look at the weather reports. Our shoulder seasons, spring and fall, also seem to be disappearing and now we skip right from winter to summer or summer to winter. This means I might miss out on my favorite season, fall.

How has integrating climate change into your work allowed you to collaborate with programs you normally wouldn’t?

Tess: We typically work collaboratively with other programs to host data or communicate together on intersecting topics; however, climate change adds a different dimension or perspective to consider the data and how to frame it on the Data Access Portal.

What do you think are the biggest opportunities for climate and health moving forward?

Tess: For our Tracking Program, we have the opportunity to creatively combine different data to tell an integrated story about how our environment impacts our health. Using health data can add context about the impacts of climate change on Minnesotans. This is also an opportunity to work collaboratively and across disciplines to come up with climate change mitigation and adaption solutions.