Jonathan Buonocore.

Buonocore joined SPH in July, making the lengthy journey over from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research focuses on evaluating the health impacts of energy systems, and modeling health “co-benefits” of climate mitigation strategies and energy policies, largely in the United States. He has evaluated air pollution-related health impacts from a number of sectors, including electricity generation, transportation, buildings, and oil and gas production. He has also modeled the health co-benefits of strategies that include further buildout of renewable energy in the United States, federal carbon emissions standards on power plants, and carbon cap-and-invest policies for transportation in the Northeast US.

Buonocore received his ScD in Environmental Health from Harvard Chan and currently serves as PI of two large multi-institutional projects that are evaluating the air pollution and health benefits of major climate policies in the United States.

He is continuing his work as part of the new BUSPH Center for Climate and Health, and shared more about this and the importance of evaluating climate mitigation strategies through a public health lens.

As an environmental health scientist, can you talk about your primary research interests?

My primary interests are around the health impacts and health benefits of climate mitigation strategies and different energy and transportation choices. This means both developing new evaluation methods and applying them to traditional and novel climate mitigation strategies. A lot of discussions around climate strategies—whether older strategies like renewable energy, natural gas, and transportation, or newer strategies like geoengineering, carbon capture, and hydrogen—have focused largely on the climate benefits of deploying these. This means that the desired endpoints are reduced CO2 emissions, temperature decreases, and the like. While these climate strategies may also have serious implications for public health and environmental justice, discussions of the health implications have been sorely lacking. My research aims to bring health to the table.

You recently had several studies published on the health and air quality effects of natural gas leakages, as well as the environmental costs of inefficient building electrification. Can you share about the projects’ findings and further research you are excited about?

In the first study, I was part of a team lead by Dr. Drew Michanowicz at Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy (PSE). He sampled the gas being piped into homes around Boston for a variety of chemicals. We found 21 different hazardous air pollutants present in the gas, some of which are carcinogenic. This means that gas leaks in homes and in the distribution network under the streets are a source of hazardous air pollutants that’s largely unaccounted for.

Some of my future research will build from this, and work toward evaluating building electrification. Fully electrifying buildings is a strategy to get buildings off gas, which removes a source of greenhouse gases and air pollution from combustion, and as is now evident, also removes a source of hazardous air pollutants from gas leaks in homes and on the street. But it’s important to think about this in tandem with the electrical grid since electrifying buildings will put more load on the grid.

I led the second study which came out recently and demonstrates the importance of this. To truly reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, the extra electricity to power fully electrified buildings should come from non-combustion renewables. It is easier to meet this extra demand if the electrification technologies installed are efficient. Installing inefficient electric heating technologies in buildings will put a lot of extra load on the grid, and if this demand is met with fuels like coal and gas, it’s just moving the emissions around rather than reducing them.

How do your primary research areas align with the scholarship aims underway at SPH?

I am primarily focused on climate, the planet, and health, along with cities and health, while hopefully incorporating elements of the health inequities strategic direction into those. Energy and transportation infrastructure constitute about ¾ of greenhouse gas emissions and create a massive health burden through air pollution and other pathways. These same facilities can also be the root cause of many environmental justice “hot spots,” and one of the goals of my research is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while mitigating these hot spots.

Why did you choose SPH? What made the institution or role stand out?

Quite simply, BUSPH is taking climate change seriously and putting in an amount of effort commensurate with the severity of climate change as a health crisis. BUSPH has integrated climate into the strategic directions, new educational programs, and the new Center for Climate and Health. With such a creative, collaborative, and solutions-oriented environment, it’s a fantastic place!

Looking forward, what are you most excited about for this new role?

I’m really excited about this opportunity to bring a public health perspective to the mitigation of climate change. I’m eager to build a community of people that use public health methods to develop and test strategies to mitigate climate change, while promoting public health and equity.

Why public health? What speaks to you about the field and the work you do?

There seems to be a fair number of people who think that humans are somehow separate from the environment. We’re not. The planet is the biggest public health resource we have, and we’ll all be better off if we treat it that way.