Funding Opportunity: Understanding the Effects of Climate Change on Environmental Hazards in Overburdened Communities

Mapping Local Climate Change Attributable Health Burdens

Project Director (PD): Christopher Uejio
PD Organization: Florida State University
Project Location: Florida, Louisiana, and Texas
Anticipated Budget: $1,500,000.00
Project Team

Emily Harville, Tulane University
Jim Elsner, Florida State University
Emily Powell, Florida State University
Yoonjung Ahn, Colorado University Boulder

Project Summary:
Climate change is already adversely impacting human health and is projected to exacerbate environmental exposures from extreme heat, air pollution, and tropical cyclones/hurricanes. 1–3 Overburdened communities often face higher environmental exposure levels, have pre-existing health conditions that increase the risk of adverse outcomes, and have lower financial capacity to respond and recover from exposures and disasters. The project’s first overarching goal is to investigate and model interactions of neighborhood level environmental hazards. Next, time series analysis will be used to associate environmental exposures with adverse birth outcomes, illness, and deaths over 2001-2021. Innovatively, the project will also evaluate how air conditioning and filtration can be used to reduce adverse environmental exposures. The study will infer climate attributable health outcomes that will be synthesized into a cumulative risk map to summarize zip code level environmental health disparities. The second overarching goal is to project a plausible range of future climate change and environmental health disparities. Mirroring the structure of the first goal, Bayesian hierarchical modeling will be used to project a range of future scenarios and adverse birth, illness, and death outcomes that will be summarized by a separate cumulative risk map. Working with regional planning councils, a social survey will prioritize future time periods and health disparities and streamline the translation and communication of the project’s outputs (e.g., data formats, story maps). The project will build local government capacity to understand the strengths and limitations of environmental exposures, climate projections, and provide insight into health disparities.

Climate-LEAD: Climate Effects on Localized Environmental Health Disparities in Overburdened Texas Communities along Gulf Coast

Project Director (PD): Lei Zou
PD Organization: Texas A&M University
Project Location: Communities in Harris, Galveston, Chambers, Jefferson, and Orange Counties, Texas
Anticipated Budget: $1,499,990.00
Project Team

Wendy Jepson, Texas Water Resource Institute/Texas A&M University
Heng Cai, Texas A&M University
Natalie Johnson, Texas A&M University
Michelle Meyer, Texas A&M University
Siyu Yu, Texas A&M University
Qingsheng Wang, Texas A&M University
Shankar Chellam, Texas A&M University
Qi Ying, Texas A&M University
Itza Mendoza-Sanchez, Texas A&M University

Project Summary:
This project will develop fine-scaled databases, models, and tools to predict near-, mid-, and long-term impacts of climate change-intensified air pollution and water insecurity on health disparities in overburdened Texas communities along the Gulf Coast. Southeast Texas Communities have long borne the brunt of poor localized air and water quality, partially due to emissions from petrochemical facilities and frequent coastal hazards. Ongoing climate change will cause more extreme events, exacerbating environmental hazards and health crises in these already overburdened communities. This necessitates an urgent effort to quantify future environmental health disparities under climate change in these communities to inform mitigation strategies. This project brings together a multi-disciplinary team of junior, mid-career, and senior researchers to address five objectives: (1) integrating existing and simulated data to derive high-resolution databases on current and future climatic impacts on environmental hazards exposure and health outcomes; (2) developing mathematical models of regional climate, air quality, water security, and facility resilience to delineate the interacting effects of multiple natural and anthropogenic hazards on local air pollution and water insecurity; (3) leveraging toxicology-informed modeling and geospatial simulation to predict risks of asthma, cancer, life expectancy, birth outcomes, and gastrointestinal illness, in near-, mid-, and long-term timeframes; (4) developing interactive WebGIS to visualize and simulate climate change and environmental hazard effects on health; (5) designing policy, infrastructural, and individual interventions to curtail future environmental health impacts in targeted communities. The databases, models, webGIS, and strategies will guide stakeholders to strengthen health resilience to environmental hazards under climate change.

Using Climate Scenarios to Inform Public Health Planning in Overburdened Communities in Florida and Mississippi

Project Director (PD): Andrew Rumbaugh
PD Organization: Urban Institute
Project Location: Select communities in Florida and Mississippi
Anticipated Budget: $1,482,900.00
Project Team

Anuj Gangopadhyaya, Urban Institute
Sara McTarnaghan, Urban Institute
Kevin Reed, Stony Brook University
Donovan Finn, Stony Brook University
Aleszu Bajak, Urban Institute
Amy Rogin, Urban Institute
Rebecca Marx, Urban Institute

Project Summary:
Climate hazards like heat waves and hurricanes are associated with negative public health outcomes, but local governments, healthcare providers and emergency managers in overburdened communities often have inadequate tools to proactively plan for them, especially with the uncertainties of climate change. This project will develop a unique framework, at the intersection of climate and health, that will allow overburdened communities in Florida and Mississippi to develop robust public health strategies aimed at reducing negative health outcomes due to climate hazards and addressing treatment capacity at emergency rooms and hospitals. First, we will define overburdened communities according to their sociodemographic characteristics and unequal exposure to environmental burdens. Next, we will model the empirical relationships between health and extreme events by combining datasets on hospital admissions, emergency room visits, and extreme climate events in the two states - allowing a more nuanced analysis than mortality rates. Third, we will ground-truth our model assumptions by collecting qualitative data in four case study communities. Fourth, we will draw on a unique, publicly available down-scaled climate change model to forecast the public health effects of extreme events under different warming scenarios and on different timescales. Fifth, we will create an online, customizable data visualization and scenario planning tool that draws on the climate and health models. We will then collaborate with key stakeholders in the four case communities to host scenario planning workshops that envision climate health adaptation pathways. A scenario planning guide will allow other overburdened communities to replicate these analyses and workshops.

Assessing the public health risk due to tropical cyclone impacts on petrochemical facilities

Project Director (PD): Boniface Fosu
PD Organization: Mississippi State University
Project Location: Houston Ship Channel Region, TX; Baton Rouge, LA
Anticipated Budget: $1,492,014.00
Project Team

Mona Hemmati, Columbia University
Jamie Padgett, Rice University
Jonathan Sury, Columbia University
Chia-Ying Lee, Columbia University
Adom Sobel, Columbia University
Suzana Camargo, Columbia University
Kyle Mandli, Columbia University

Project Summary:
Natural disasters have long overburdened communities along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Among them, tropical cyclones (TCs) are the most consequential. Direct hazards from TCs include high winds, heavy rains, and storm surges, but TCs can also beget other, equally destructive hazards. The latter include petrochemical spills from aboveground storage tanks (ASTs), which are critical infrastructure to the Gulf region’s oil and gas industry. The communities that are most affected by TCs and petrochemical spills remain among the poorest nationwide and, to this day, lack the capacity to deal with the plethora of health, environmental, and socioeconomic consequences that have traditionally followed in their wake. An added burden is

climate change, which is expected to exacerbate existing TC hazards, thus raising the specter of more intense storms, leading to more frequent severe spills. What remains unknown is the potential extent of these spills and their human health outcomes. We propose a modeling framework that will allow us to discern the spill dynamics for ASTs and their human health implications in response to TC hazards, both in the current climate and under plausible scenarios of future carbon emissions.

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Funding Opportunity: Understanding the Effects of Climate Change on Environmental Hazards in Overburdened Communities

Awarded 2023

Resources

Awarded Projects

My Academies

Funding Opportunity: Understanding the Effects of Climate Change on Environmental Hazards in Overburdened Communities

Awarded 2023

Resources

Awarded Projects