How a Sandia systems analyst connects the dots between climate change and disease

Everything on Earth is connected — knitted together in a fragile system, whose health is impacted by climate change.

For Sandia’s Anthony Falzarano, there is little separation between plants, animals, humans and the global environment. Anthony spends his days as a systems analyst, working from rural southeastern Ohio, studying the links of interdependency between ecosystems and the subsequent relationship to the health of human populations.

“From the health-security perspective, climate change is obviously important and really hits on a lot of important things that we care about in our research space. You can think about it in a widespread way, for example, in terms of food security, heat stressors and water insecurity, but also my areas of expertise, biology and microbiology,” Anthony said.

Anthony and his peers at Sandia support the Department of Homeland Security’s Health, Food and Agricultural Resilience Directorate, which was formed after COVID-19 to better understand how human, environmental and animal health systems are interlinked. Anthony is specifically interested in the spread of zoonotic diseases, or infections that can be spread between animals and humans.

“We talk about climate change as being important in changing the ecology of certain diseases, of making new diseases more likely to emerge,” Anthony said.

Anthony holds a master’s degree in biodefense from George Mason University and a bachelor’s degree in environmental microbiology from Ohio State University.

At times, climate change research and mitigation can be viewed through a broad, wide sweeping lens. However, Anthony’s approach to climate change research focuses on how one tiny change can impact an entire ecosystem.

“Sometimes lesser, smaller things like just taking an organism that used to only live as far north as Maryland and now making it move or live as far north as New York can impact dynamics and ecology of whole systems. That small thing changes everything,” Anthony said.

The One Health approach

Anthony’s background in emergency response and health security is directly tied to the concept of a holistic, interwoven global environmental concept called One Health.

“One Health is a pretty contemporary idea in public health and health security,” Anthony said. “At Sandia, we do a lot of work with customers who must interface with the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration to look at how the health space, national security space and climate change intersect and how certain factors could make us vulnerable.”

The Sandia team and others in the One Health space focus on putting knowledge and data collected from various sources into use to optimize health outcomes. For example, they research ways to use new infectious disease surveillance information that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“All of a sudden (after COVID-19), everyone started doing wastewater surveillance and sampling environments and animals, but what do we do with the data? What does it mean to know that we saw COVID-19 in deer? Could that be a stressor down the road that could impact our ability to provide for ourselves and our people and our food and water security? Sandia is leading that work. As a nation, we must be aware of what climate change is going to mean for us in the future and our ability to compete and survive in a global space,” Anthony said.

The systemic, holistic concept of One Health means everything on the globe is tied together and has the potential to impact something else. For Anthony, climate security and public health security are inextricably interconnected. Both ideas are based on evaluation of critical infrastructure, resiliency and mitigation of potential future stressors. Climate change coupled with health security is a complex problem to navigate, but Anthony believes the broad expertise cultivated at Sandia has the potential to make a difference.

“I would say the people, the capabilities and our reputation at Sandia are the most impactful things,” Anthony said. “I don’t know much about modeling or computers, but I do know that other Sandians can create sophisticated models of what could impact ecosystems. Those high-fidelity models could show us that spring thawing could happen quicker due to climate change, and then we could help our customers analyze what that would mean for our planting season, plant pathology and what could kill our crops.”

Widespread impact

The interconnected nature of Anthony’s work means he evaluates complex issues from various lenses and sources, sometimes predicting daunting global outcomes, but that doesn’t deter him from the work. Instead, he aspires to share the data in an approachable way so that everyone understands how climate change impacts their lives.

“I went to school with a lot of people who went into medicine. You don’t think of it as an impact to them, but it does. Your patients are going to be stressed by certain things and present illnesses in different ways, no matter which medical specialty you go into. If you’re an infectious disease doctor, you might have to start wondering about different zoonotic diseases. If you’re primary care, you’re going to have to worry about medical, social inequity and all types of environmental exposures,” Anthony said.

“There is this misconception that if (climate change) hasn’t impacted you directly, you can insulate yourself from it forever, but eventually it will affect you either directly or indirectly,” he said.

Anthony doesn’t mean to be alarmist. Instead, his intent is to draw connections between how we live now and how we can mitigate, or at least plan for, future impacts to our ecosystems and security.

“It’s all about awareness and advocacy,” he said. “I would say climate change is the single greatest threat that we have ever faced as a planet.”