UW researchers partner with communities to save lives from extreme heat and climate-related disasters
The impacts of climate change on human health are severe: Extreme heat events put stress on the body, increasing the risk of heat stroke, hospitalization for heart disease, kidney failure, and poor mental health. In the U.S., deaths due to extreme heat have increased 117% from 1999 to 2023. Climate-related disasters like wildfires, drought, and flooding can lead to illness or injury, while increased temperatures can spread infectious diseases.
That’s why researchers at the University of Washington School of Public Health are working with the communities most impacted by climate change to prepare for extreme heat events or climate-related disasters. This work is called climate change adaptation, and is critical to saving lives and building resilient communities.
Partnerships between faculty, local governments, and communities are innovating data-informed heat mapping tools, supporting communities to receive funding for climate-change related health impacts, and training the next generation of leaders to prepare for climate-related disasters. Collectively, their work will protect the health of people in Washington and globally.
“While we are making great progress in climate change mitigation, we still have unmanaged risk for population health driven by climate change and we are not investing adequately in preparing for that,” said Jeremy Hess, professor and director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE) in the UW School of Public Health, which leads important work on supporting communities for the health impacts of climate change. “We are looking forward to having a meaningful impact in that space regionally and globally. We are also eager to work collaboratively across the university and with partners locally and regionally, in practice, research, global health, and philanthropy. There’s a lot of opportunity here.”
A tool to innovate heat health risk mapping
When extreme heat events occur in Washington state, everyone can feel the impacts, but some feel them more acutely than others.
That’s why Hess and fellow researchers at CHanGE have been mapping out how extreme heat impacts communities differently in Washington. They created the Climate Health and Risk Tool (CHaRT), a heat-health risk mapping and decision support tool. These maps show how temperatures vary across counties during extreme heat events and the vulnerability of people to heat impacts in these counties. CHaRT helps businesses, health departments, policymakers, and other organizations assess community risk to climate-related environmental events based on three factors: vulnerability, hazard and exposure, and then points them to interventions to consider.
Recently, Public Health – Seattle & King County and Puget Sound Energy have been using the tool to help support the communities they serve. These local partnerships will help CHanGE improve CHaRT so that it can expand its reach and impact from Washington state to across the country.
Public Health – Seattle & King County
Public Health – Seattle & King County (PHSKC) has been using CHaRT in a pilot project to help formulate community-driven solutions to climate change health impacts in Auburn, Washington. As an urban heat island, Auburn was one of the most negatively impacted communities in western Washington by the 2021 heat dome in the Pacific Northwest.
In partnership with Gates Ventures and Dr. Saria Hassan from Emory University, the pilot project is called the Climate and Health Adaptation Mapping Project for Community Determined Solutions (CHAMP-CDS). PHSKC has gathered a 15 community member workgroup from Auburn to learn about their experiences with extreme heat in the city, share information with them on heat health impacts, and collectively create a model for solutions to extreme heat that can be shared with decision makers.
“Climate change is making heat events last longer, be more frequent, and be more intense,” said Cat Hartwell, project manager for CHAMP-CDS at PHSKC. “Heat doesn't affect populations equally and it is locally specific, so a project like this is important because you get these hyperlocal community-determined solutions that people who are experiencing the heat are identifying themselves.”
At one of these recent community workgroup gatherings in Auburn, Hess demonstrated how to use CHaRT to see vulnerability indicators for a region. These indicators include things like mobile homes, social isolation, outdoor workers, or extreme poverty. This can help decision makers see where interventions like cooling centers or air conditioning installations should be prioritized.
While CHaRT is able to represent data at the county level, Hess’s partnership with PHSKC will also provide his team with more hyperlocal data, which can help improve CHaRT. The Auburn community group will share feedback with Hess on how the tool is helpful or could be improved. This multi-way sharing of information will be useful to both researchers and communities in scaling up CHaRT nationally.
“CHaRT is the most advanced and local tool on heat available for us and it is very specific to Washington state,” said Bradley Kramer, who leads the Climate and Health Equity Initiative at PHSKC. “As we are able to get down to a more local level, we will be able to build out the tool for the health departments to get more specific on who and where and why folks are most impacted by heat.”
Puget Sound Energy
Washington's Clean Energy Transformation Act of 2019 required utility companies to create plans to convert to an electricity supply free of greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. To fulfill this goal, Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Washington's largest utility, created its Clean Energy Implementation Plan, with a focus on how to transition to clean energy in a way that does not burden vulnerable populations.
PSE is using CHaRT to identify vulnerable populations who are most energy-burdened in the state so it can support these groups. CHaRT can show how geographic regions experiencing the highest temperatures might also have large populations of low-income households that would be financially burdened by the energy costs of cooling their homes. Demonstrating this need can help organizations like PSE solicit funding to help communities, such as grants for clean energy like solar panels.
“This innovative tool has enabled us to tackle a range of critical questions, including identifying areas of our service territory with customers most at risk, and understanding how these high-risk areas intersect with our electrical infrastructure,” said Michael Wehling, PSE program manager for energy equity. “The valuable insights and data sets generated by CHaRT will inform numerous decisions that will shape PSE's immediate future, ultimately helping us achieve our goals around clean energy and equity.”
UW students Cordy Plymale and Payton Curley interned with CHanGE in summer 2024 through the EarthLab Summer Internship Program. There, they helped gather information on how organizations like PSE have been using CHaRT to help their customers and what improvements could be made to better serve communities.
“What’s cool about CHaRT is the focus on vulnerability, because a lot of tools or work being done around climate and health risk do not focus as much on this aspect,” said Plymale, a public health-global health major. “It highlights the fact that different socioeconomic factors like English literacy, racial and ethnic status, social isolation, or education levels impact how people experience climate hazards and risks. It helps you think about how those harms are not evenly distributed because of different injustices and systemic oppression.”
CHaRTing a future
CHaRT will be the foundation of a national research trial as part of a grant Hess and his UW SPH collaborators received from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The P20 grant will form a new exploratory research center called the University of Washington (UW) Research and Engagement on Adaptation for Climate and Health (REACH). CHaRT will play a critical role as the REACH center works to implement evidence-based health adaptation at scale.
CHanGE was also recently awarded a grant from the Wellcome Trust to understand how socioeconomic factors will influence climate change’s health impacts over the next century. Led by UW SPH Professors Kristie Ebi and Jeremy Hess, the project will update the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, or scenarios defined by the United Nations to project ways global society might evolve in areas like population growth, income inequality and technological advances. Accurate projections will help countries prepare for future health burdens caused by climate change, so that they can protect population health for decades to come.
UW SPH Climate Change Innovation
Center for Disaster Resilient Communities
The Center for Disaster Resilient Communities (CDRC) coordinates research, education, training and technical assistance efforts to expand the University of Washington’s ability to contribute to advances in the field of disaster science. Led by Nicole Errett, associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences, the center has recently been leading work to train the next generation of climate scientists. CDRC operates the training program Increasing Diversity in and Equitable Access to Applied Learning in Disaster Research Response (IDEAAL DR2). This gathers a cohort of advanced graduate students and early career hazards and disaster researchers from across the country to support their projects surrounding adapting communities to climate change. The scholars participating in the program have lived experiences as members of communities severely impacted by climate change. Some of their projects include supporting communities most impacted by sea level rise, how humans interact with infrastructure amidst disaster, and evaluating community’s emergency disaster preparedness responses.
Center for Environmental Health Equity
The Center for Environmental Health Equity (CEHE) supports tribal and BIPOC organizations in accessing environmental and energy justice funding. Led by Edmund Seto, professor of environmental and occupational health sciences, CEHE helps communities apply for grants that support their work adapting to climate change impacts. Indigenous, BIPOC, and low-income communities often face the worst impacts of climate change, which underscores the importance of facilitating access to funding. CEHE serves communities in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington state as one of 16 Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers funded by the Environmental Protection Agency. CEHE specializes in skill sharing, where researchers can provide best practices for grant applications and communities can share their knowledge about what is needed to adapt to extreme heat, natural disasters, and other climate impacts. Unique to CEHE’s organization is a goal to provide 40% of its funding back to communities through subgrants. This goal aligns with environmental justice practices set by the Biden administration through its Justice40 Initiative, to prioritize energy and environmental funding for communities most impacted by climate change.
Collaborative on Extreme Heat Events
The Collaborative on Extreme Heat Events provides a forum for public health agencies serving the metropolitan areas of Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, BC, to share their experiences and innovations in responding to extreme heat. The 2021 heat dome in Washington state that killed 126 people showed a critical need to create a network of support and solutions for adapting communities to climate change events. Led by Resham Patel, assistant teaching professor of environmental and occupational health sciences, the collaborative is co-developing an action and research agenda to facilitate partnerships and continued learning about climate and health interventions. They will develop this research agenda through an 18-month process that includes a peer-sharing webinar series and a participatory workshop.