Water insecurity and our health: Lessons from the Galapagos

Ronald O. Ball Lectureship in Food and Agriculture

Clean, safe water is necessary for our health and nutrition. Understanding the pathways through which water insecurity shapes health at the individual and household levels and how it interacts with food is critical for improving physical and mental health now and in the face of environmental and climate change.

Water insecurity remains a challenge globally — whether we look close to home in our rural communities, or we look at the local population in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. Amanda L. Thompso, our guest speaker, examines the impact of water insecurity and the impact of water on health and nutrition against the backdrop of the challenges that local communities in the Galapagos Islands face when the pressures of tourism conflicts with the need for clean water and farmland.

Join us for the Ronald O. Ball Lectureship in Food and Agriculture to learn more about water insecurity, water’s impact on health, and the struggle to ensure our basic needs will be met in the future.

This free event is from 3:30 – 5 p.m. MDT on March 21 in the Maple Leaf room of the Lister Conference Centre. It will be hosted in-person without a livestream. A recording of the presentation will be posted to our website after the event.

Register

About the Speaker

Amanda L. Thompson is professor and chair in the Department of Anthropology, professor in the Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and interim Co-Director of the Center for Galapagos Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her masters of public health and PhD from Emory University. She held a postdoctoral position at the Gillings School of Global Public Health and the Carolina Population Center. Trained in human biology and nutritional epidemiology, she focuses on the biological pathways linking early life social, behavioural and physical environments to the development of obesity and chronic disease across a range of national and international settings, including North Carolina, China, Zambia and Ecuador. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She is the recipient of the 2014 Human Biology Association Michael A. Little Early Career Award and the 2019 Norman Kretchmer Memorial Award in Nutrition and Development from the American Society for Nutrition.

Abstract

The importance of having access to sufficient quantities of clean water for improving human nutrition and health is increasingly recognized. Yet, water insecurity remains a challenge to human health globally. Understanding the pathways through which water insecurity shapes health at the individual and household levels and how it interacts with food is critical for improving physical and mental health now and in the face of environmental and climate change. This talk describes the social, behavioural and biological pathways linking water and food access and quality to health across the lifespan, highlighting examples from our on-going work in the Galapagos Islands.