Everest climbers, Ecuadorians, and environmental justice: a One Health approach to teaching undergraduate cardiorespiratory physiology

The One Health framework describes reciprocal and obligatory relationships between human physiology, the environment, and social determinants of health. While undergraduate education has historically considered each of these disciplines in isolation, this narrow focus leaves students unprepared to respond to current and emerging threats to human health from environmental or social origins. In contrast, One Health creates opportunities for more integrated curricula linking core concepts of physiology with real world challenges of student interest and societal need. For example, climate change is an existential threat to public health that demands interventions focused on mitigating or adapting to physiological changes that accompany life in extreme environments. Importantly, the physiological impacts and responses to this threat are not uniformly experienced across all geographies or socioeconomic strata. Here we describe a lesson that bridges the gap between traditional physiology education and environmental physiology. This interrupted case study considers high altitude climbers and indigenous populations living in mountainous regions, creating opportunities for undergraduates to learn cardiorespiratory physiology in the context of climate science, health equity, and introductory research ethics and methods. This customizable framework, which includes peer discussion questions and assessments, will be valuable to educators who would like their students to be able to: Calculate barometric pressure, partial pressure, and arterial oxygen saturation and compare to experimentally generated data.Predict changes to the oxygen-hemoglobin dissociation curve at extreme altitudes.Describe changes to short-term and long-term buffering systems to maintain pH homeostasis at high altitudes. Evaluate physiological impacts on populations that experience extreme climates. Propose clinical applications for environmental physiology research. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.