Bavaria's Minister of Health at the opening of the Master's programme ECCH

At the opening ceremony of the "Environment, Climate Change and Health" (ECCH) degree programme, Bavaria's Minister of Health Klaus Holetschek called for a determined approach to the risks of climate change for health. Holetschek said: "Environment, climate change and health must be thought of together. I am all the more pleased that these topics are now being linked in a degree programme." The degree programme comes at the right time, he said, because it is becoming increasingly clear that the environmental changes caused by climate change have a strong impact on people's physical and mental health. "The better the links between climate change and health are recognised, the more successfully we can meet this challenge. The international degree programme is an important step in this direction," the Minister emphasised.

Prof. Dr. mult. Eckhard Nagel, programme coordinator of the ECCH programme, added: "For a long time, we were convinced that climate and environmental changes in our latitudes would remain manageable and ultimately not be dangerous to us humans. Not only since the terrible floods last year in the Ahr valley and elsewhere do we know: Exactly the opposite is true! That is why it is high time that we educate expert young people so that we as individuals and as a society learn comprehensively how to deal with the challenges. The international and interdisciplinary Master's programme Environment, Climate Change and Health at the University of Bayreuth can make an essential contribution to this. The programme deals with topics of high relevance, from an economic and natural science perspective as well as from a social and environmental policy perspective. Students learn to understand problems relating to the environment, climate change and health from a holistic, interdisciplinary approach and to derive forward-looking measures from this. The University of Bayreuth is once again an important driving force here."