It’s not just politicians and environmental scientists sounding the alarm on climate change anymore. A growing number of professionals are calling for action, including civil engineers, landscape architects, chefs and school teachers.

In commentary published in The New England Journal of Medicine in January, a pair of Boston doctors claim physicians have “a special responsibility” to safeguard humankind from the crescendo in climate change-related health problems.

The World Health Organization backs this idea, calling climate change “the greatest challenge of the 21st century.”

“It is a true public health emergency,” declares a call for policy action issued this year by the American Medical Association and 73 other medical groups.

Religious leaders are also driving action for climate justice. While many evangelical Christians reject the premise of climate change as a crisis spawned by humans, other Christian congregations are mobilizing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

The Episcopal church, notably, has called out climate change denial as immoral. Regardless of the official U.S. stance on the Paris climate agreement, the church maintains that it’s still committed to the international solutions deal.

Civil Beat talked to a Honolulu doctor and a Kailua Episcopal reverend who are taking new approaches to their work in the face of a warming climate.

When Kaena Point’s greenish brown triangle finally punctured the monotonous blue line where sky meets sea, Dr. Darragh O’Carroll jolted himself out of a strange peace.

O’Carroll, 34, is an emergency room doctor at Kuakini Medical Center. Born in Ireland and raised in Hawaii Kai, he developed a love of sports like rugby and paddling, an interest in cars and mechanical engineering and a deep appreciation for the ocean lapping at his neighborhood’s sandy edges.

In college, O’Carroll shadowed a general practitioner at Pali Momi Medical Center for a summer when he was still in search of his calling. That’s when he first set his sights on a career in medicine.

The apprenticeship also helped him arrive at an understanding of what drives his overarching purpose: A desire to be of service.

“I think I went into medicine to be helpful and useful, and I chose emergency medicine because I was just trying to think about, ‘Where can I be the Swiss army knife?’” O’Carroll said.

“With emergency medicine, it’s kind of about grabbing everything that’s emergent and unique about every field and having to know about all of that — bones, heart attacks, strokes, severe infections. In that way, I think the emergency medicine physician is kind of akin to the old school physician.”

The intersection between climate change and public health is something O’Carroll discovered years later while reading a research paper about the Kenyan highlands. He learned that warmer weather and spiking humidity were driving mosquitoes to higher altitudes, infecting a population of Kenyans with malaria that previously didn’t have to worry about insect-borne diseases.

O’Carroll figured there must be other climate change consequences for public health. So he sought them out, scouring science journals and news stories for connections between weather and medicine.

Here’s a sampling of what he found: The risk of vector-borne illness, such as dengue fever and Lyme disease, is heightened in places like southeast Asia, Micronesia and New England, where mosquito and tick bites are on the rise. Heat illness is making vulnerable new populations that aren’t accustomed to prolonged and severe heat waves. The severity of natural disasters caused by hurricanes, wildfires, flooding and tsunamis is amplifying.

“Disease patterns vary throughout the seasons and so now that our seasons are changing all of our disease patterns are altering, as well,” O’Carroll explained.

“Probably one of the more tragic issues that I’ve encountered is that seawater salt is getting into the drinking water of people in Bangladesh and causing high blood pressure and tragic miscarriages in a patriarchal society where miscarriages are automatically seen as the woman’s fault.”

A Physician’s Guide To Climate Change

In the ER, O’Carroll incorporates what he knows about climate change into his patient assessments. For example, his radar is tuned up for signs of severe fever, headache or body aches in patients who have recently traveled to countries experiencing dengue fever outbreaks.

It’s not something Hawaii residents should worry about now, O’Carroll said. Hawaii has not had a dengue outbreak since 2015-2016, when there were 264 confirmed cases, primarily on the Big Island.

But with dengue risk high in many parts of Asia and the Pacific, he’s keeping a close eye out for symptoms in travelers at risk of importing the illness to the islands.

By illuminating the ways climate change is already influencing people’s health, O’Carroll believes he’s found a way to personalize a predicament that, although dire, can often seem distant.

“People, me included, have a hard time putting things in perspective until they start losing their own health,” O’Carroll said. “When you start losing your own health, it’s the things that you never appreciated before that start to matter most.”

“So if we can convince people that climate change is affecting you now and today, then hopefully you’ll take the steps to convince the politicians representing you and your local leaders to take action on it.”

Boots On The Ground

Apart from his vigilance in the ER, O’Carroll is joining the fight for climate justice by volunteering for disaster relief efforts around the globe.

In September he spent two weeks providing on-the-ground aid and assistance to people devastated by Dorian, the worst tropical cyclone to strike the Bahamas in the country’s history.

Last month he became the medical director for All Hands And Hearts, a nonprofit disaster relief organization that’s helping rebuild storm-ravaged communities in places like Florida, Texas, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Mozambique and Peru.

Now he’s in the process of filming a documentary titled “Infected Earth” about the public health impacts of climate change.

So far he has self-funded the filming of a segment that tells the story of a New Hampshire family in which the father, mother and daughter have all been infected with tick-borne diseases.

O’Carroll is raising funds to complete the film and, he hopes, find it a home on a major movie streaming platform.

“My whole goal is to get across to people that this is something that is here today,” O’Carroll said. “It’s not just a problem of melting ice caps and polar bears. While those are tragic, it is affecting us now, our families and our communities.”