Professor Awarded $3.2M Grant to Expand Urban Heat Research.

Professor Awarded $3.2M Grant to Expand Urban Heat Research
Patricia Fabian and her team will raise awareness of heat-related health risks, elevate city residents’ experiences, and synthesize the effects of local policies on heat mitigation and health in frontline US communities.
Wellcome, a charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom, has granted Patricia Fabian, associate professor of environmental health, a $3.2 million Climate Impacts Award to expand the scope of her ongoing research on extreme heat and health.
Over the next three years, Fabian will lead an interdisciplinary team of researchers from across Boston University, including faculty, staff, and students from SPH’s Center for Climate and Health (CCH), the BU Initiative on Cities (IOC), the BU Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), and the BU URBAN graduate studies program. Together, they will collaborate with non-profits Dialogue Earth and A Better City (ABC) to raise public awareness of heat-related health risks and identify solutions that enhance the resilience of vulnerable communities to extreme temperatures.
“There are many existing policies, interventions, and investments that impact heat exposure,” says Fabian, who is both the associate director of IGS and an affiliate faculty member of CCH. “An example is the weatherization of buildings to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Nobody is talking about health benefits related to extreme temperatures in that case.”
The overarching goal of the project, titled “Making extreme weather health impacts visible through household energy, climate, and sustainability policies in frontline communities,” is to link sustainability solutions with thermal comfort. Many of the policies and interventions that cities are already implementing to strengthen their resilience to climate change could also help reduce extreme heat exposure, thereby improving public health. By emphasizing this connection with health, Fabian hopes that, “maybe change will happen faster, more efficiently, or even occur when it otherwise might not have.”
The research effort draws on SPH’s growing expertise on heat and its relationship to health, developed over the years through initiatives like C-HEAT, a collaborative research project between SPH and the community organization GreenRoots, which examines heat exposure in Chelsea and East Boston. Another predecessor is B-COOL, a heat sensor pilot Fabian launched in partnership with ABC, the City of Boston’s Environment Department, and The Boston Foundation. The program, which took place in neighborhoods throughout Boston last summer, evaluated whether the city’s current mechanism of declaring heat emergencies equitably addresses heat risk.
Several of SPH’s most experienced faculty are slated to contribute, including Madeleine Scammell, associate professor of environmental health and co-principal investigator with Fabian on C-HEAT; Gregory Wellenius, professor of environmental health and CCH director; Kevin Lane, associate professor of environmental health and CCH chief data officer. Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, research associate professor of health law, policy, and management, will also join the research effort, bringing her focus on the effects of the built environment on children and families. Rounding out the interdisciplinary team of faculty involved in the project are Lucy Hutyra and Ian Sue-Wing, professors in BU’s Department of Earth & Environment.
The team plans to use the funds to address four aims. First, they aim to evaluate the ability of existing climate, sustainability, and household energy policies to mitigate the effects of extreme temperatures, both in the U.S. and the Global South. Second, they aim to map local vulnerability to extreme heat and highlight the lived experiences of residents in three U.S. cities—Boston, Phoenix, and New Orleans—each representing distinct climates with different heat resilience challenges. To this end, the researchers will employ two different strategies for capturing community input: a mobile application residents can use to report their experiences of weather events, and photovoice, a qualitative research method whereby participants share experiences by narrating their photography. Third, the team aims to visualize the benefits of ongoing interventions and build networks of local stakeholders through the pilot of a new extreme temperature-health risk tool. And fourth, they intend to develop high-quality, multilingual content to communicate lessons learned from the project with a wide range of audiences, from journalists and policy makers to relevant business actors and healthcare providers.
With such an extensive to-do list, the team is eager to engage students in the process. “I find that these projects, where there is a combination of field work, community engagement, epidemiology, and policy work, are really attractive to students,” says Fabian. She encourages students interested in gaining research experience to reach out to her.
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