CID’s faculty affiliates embody the breadth and depth of international development research at Harvard. Faculty affiliates hail from across Harvard and work in every region of the world, on every topic in development.
By Diana King
Christopher Golden, Associate Professor of Nutrition and Planetary Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and CID Faculty Affiliate, has a singular mission: to explore the interconnectedness of human and ecosystem health, and to use the results of his research to inform policies that help both flourish.
“For me, there are no two issues more important than the conservation of our planet, and the support of human well-being,” he says. Linking the two, he adds, is the global food system, which is vulnerable to environmental resource demands and climate crises.
A leading scholar in planetary health, a transdisciplinary field that aims to understand the complex web of dependence between the Earth and all its lifeforms, Golden has examined how coastal and terrestrial ecosystems impact nutrition, disease patterns, and public health outcomes in Madagascar; quantified the nutritional impact of the global decline in fish stocks due to rising sea temperatures on developing nations; helped link climate change to southern Madagascar’s recurrent drought, a phenomenon TIME magazine dubbed “the world’s first climate famine”; and assessed how aquatic food production can simultaneously improve global health outcomes and reduce environmental impact.
On any given day, the Golden Lab (a team of 16 researchers, postdocs, phd students, and data engineers) is abuzz with the churn of hundreds of millions of data points; some pulled from ongoing fieldwork on aquatic food systems in developing island nations, others culled from public health clinics and satellite sensing systems. They have studied how heat stress and coral bleaching disrupt coral reef food systems, making traditional diets harder to secure in places like Kiribati, where a growing reliance on imported processed and fast foods has led to high rates of obesity and diabetes.
One of the first to connect the dots between climate change, global fisheries, and human health, Golden sees fishery management and sustainable aquaculture (often overlooked in policy discussions) as a promising solution to a looming food crisis. According to a recent study, over 4 billion people worldwide do not consume enough micronutrients (vitamins and minerals critical in small amounts to physiological and mental health), a health risk compounded by the strain of geopolitical conflict and climate change on local food systems.
In the most comprehensive study of its kind, Golden and his co-authors measured hundreds of nutrients across 3,753 aquatic food taxa. Compared to beef, lamb, chicken, or pork, aquatic foods such as fish, clams, and oysters are richer in micronutrients (like zinc, iron, vitamins A and B12, and essential fatty acids), far more biodiverse, have a lower environmental impact, and carry a lower disease burden than red and processed meats.
Getting aquatic food systems right – improving local fisheries management, strengthening marine governance, counteracting coral reef and mangrove degradation, managing marine protected areas in a way that accounts for both conservation and human nutrition needs – could offset both malnutrition and biodiversity loss. On the ground in southwestern Madagascar, a research team is testing the theory by building artificial coral reefs to rehabilitate fish stocks, a vital source of nutrients, at a time when local agriculture has been devastated by years of drought.
The idea, Golden enthuses, is that “by restoring the coral reefs, we can restore biodiversity…and people’s access to and consumption of fish, and [thereby] create a vibrant, nutritious, and sustainable system.”
From a bird’s eye view, his work has two overarching aims: finding the optimization point between elements that seem at odds (how do we create food systems that minimize environmental costs and maximize human nutrition benefits), and using numbers and data to render visible – and therefore more manageable – what cannot be easily seen (the link between climate change and global health, environmental degradation and malnutrition, habitat loss and disease patterns).
Currently, Golden’s second big focus is developing a scalable climate-smart public health (CSPH) platform that integrates public health and global climate data to predict emerging risks, empowering communities to prepare targeted responses. It is a massive undertaking, encompassing all of a country’s health data (including, in the case of Madagascar, over 60 health conditions for its entire population of 30 million people), and decades of global climate and environmental data from remote sensing systems.
Created in close partnership with local ministries of health and the Harvard Data Science Initiative, CSPH uses machine-learning and artificial intelligence to overlay disease patterns with crop production and weather data (temperature, rainfall, soil moisture, wind speed, forest change, etc.), enabling public health practitioners to see where, when, and how environmental and climate variability impacts people’s health. By uncovering the historical patterns, Golden says, “countries could better understand what parts of their health system are being affected by climate change, and how best to protect themselves from it.”
The idea of a global disease monitoring and control platform linked to climate threats isn’t entirely new, but Golden’s team has grounded it in a real-life location, having been uniquely granted the entirety of Madagascar’s public health data – a testament to Golden’s longstanding and deep ties to the country.
Golden has conducted field research in Madagascar since 1999, when, at 16, he convinced a Duke University wildlife biologist to hire him as an assistant. The culmination of an enduring fascination with Madagascar that started with a third-grade report on ring-tailed lemurs, the trip would mark the start of a vocation.
As early as he can remember, he says, he felt a connection with nature that found resonance in Malagasy views of the sacred bond between the land and all living things. Golden grew up in Cohasset, Massachusetts, a small fishing town on the South Shore, where childhood nature walks with his mother sparked a lifelong love of the natural world. In Madagascar, an island nation known for its extraordinary biodiversity (it is home to hundreds of thousands of plant and animal species, over 85 percent of which exist nowhere else on Earth), he expected to study wildlife, but was irrevocably changed by living with local people whose very existence depended on the forest.
“People’s lives [there] are completely at the whim of weather and soil and natural processes,” he says. Of the approximately 300 items in the local diet, only a handful, including sugar, flour, salt, and oil are purchased in stores. Everything else, from food to shelter to medicines, is sourced from the forest. “It’s their supermarket, their pharmacy, their hardware store, their church…it’s everything to them,” Golden stated in a National Geographic interview (he was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2014, and was a lead in its documentary Virus Hunters in 2020).
Humbled by their knowledge of the forest, he returned “as an apprentice to the local people” every year for months at a time, becoming fluent in multiple dialects of Malagasy, and undertaking numerous projects of impact, including a pioneering study on the nutritional value of bushmeat consumption, and the development of a sustainable village poultry system.
“I learned more living in the forest than I ever did in my formal education,” notes Golden, who graduated from Harvard College with a special major in environmental conservation, and earned an MPH in epidemiology, and a PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from UC Berkeley. “I really see all my research as a tribute to the people that I have lived and worked with. None of my ideas are new ideas. I’m just painting indigenous conceptualizations of how the environment relates to well-being with numbers and empirical data.”
Since 2004, he has conducted long-term population surveys on how people in northeastern Madagascar rely on natural resources for their health, in collaboration with Madagascar Health and Environmental Research (MAHERY), a non-profit organization he founded to work with local students and researchers. MAHERY, a local word that means “strength,” responds to challenges with interdisciplinary research and public health programs, and trains American and Malagasy students in research methods.
As political winds shift, MAHERY remains one of a few local organizations helping to carry on critical long-term research in the face of federal funding cuts. When the Trump administration’s grant terminations occurred last April, “my team lost $5 million dollars overnight,” says Golden. “It was a huge hit.” Several months later, Madagascar’s government was overthrown after youth-led protests gained military support, and the ministers who co-created Madagascar’s CSPH platform were let go.
In these fraught times, Golden remains resolute; his conviction driven by evidence of progress: “A lot of our projects show promising signals of working,” and, despite obstacles, students with “the fire to make the world a better place” are still choosing to enter these fields. “The only path forward,” he insists, “is to fight and protect our planet, and the people living on it.”
In November, the Chief Research Officer at the Nepal Health Research Council, Dr. Meghnath Dhimal, arrived in Boston to start scaling the CSPH infrastructure to Nepal – a project funded by CID. On Dhimal’s way to meet with Golden, he passed under the entry to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where a bold motto beckoned, a reminder of the fight yet to be won: “Health, dignity, and justice for every human.”
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