On Sept. 9, 2020, 7.7 million San Francisco Bay Area residents had the collective breath knocked out of them. That morning, they looked out their windows in horror as the sun disappeared behind an apocalyptic orange haze that lingered for more than a day and made it difficult to see and breathe.
An estimated 8,000 wildfires burned 4.2 million acres in the state that year, more than double any prior year going back to 1950. The emergency, as well as the larger trend toward more and larger wildfires in recent years, sparked the creation of the UC Center for Climate, Health and Equity (CCHE).
Co-founders and UC San Francisco faculty Arianne Teherani , PhD, and Sheri Weiser , MD, who were researching the impact of climate change on health when the emergency hit, felt the day crystalized for them the sheer urgency of the climate-health crisis.
"We said, 'Our children, like many others, can't go to school and can't breathe the outside air,'" Teherani recalled. "And the negative health effects are worse for small children and seniors with asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and other chronic health conditions in disproportionately impacted communities."
So, CCHE, a UC-wide initiative based at UCSF, was born and charged with training the next generation of health care providers about the impacts of climate-related events on health and well-being, especially in disproportionately impacted communities.
Last month, the 3-year-old center was one of 20 recipients nationwide to receive a National Institute of Health (NIH) P20 grant, which it plans to use to expand its work by studying climate-health disparities, their impact on communities and to build partnerships to address them.
The expansion builds on the center's work training more than 100 UC faculty and educating more than 7,000 UC students on climate, health and sustainability. It has even launched UC Climate Resilience , a UC-wide course on climate change and mental health resilience that has enrolled graduate and undergraduate students throughout the system. The center has also contributed detailed climate data on California's air pollution, extreme heat and unprecedented precipitation to UCSF's Health Atlas , an interactive mapping tool for measuring health in underprivileged communities.
Reach across culture and language
The recent $4.2 million grant will be spread over three years to launch the Center's Equity and Climate Opportunities for Health (ECO-Health) initiative, a UC collaboration with UCSF, UC Berkeley and UCLA to identify communities most impacted by climate change and develop strategies to improve health and reduce disparities. ECO-Health's objectives include developing a cadre of researchers trained to identify inequitable health impacts of climate change and partnering with those communities to take action.
"We designed ECO-Health Center to identify communities that would be disproportionately impacted by climate-related catastrophic events and to test solutions to build resilience and reduce health inequities," Weiser said. "Imagine, for example, if warning alerts about air pollution could go out to patients with COPD based on their location that alert them to remain indoors and to use their inhalers. This would help reduce health crises and surges in Emergency Department visits."
Teherani added that it is also crucial to develop and disseminate solutions that address community concerns and engage local languages and cultures.
"ECO-Health's focus on equitable community engagement in all phases of research is core to ensuring that solutions truly address the roots of climate-health inequities and facilitate healthy futures for the most affected communities," she said.
The visionaries see this as the beginning of exploring how to build climate resilience in our communities for the greatest health benefits and to reduce health inequities as extreme weather patterns likely become the norm.
