Health Equity in the Wake of Continued Climate Change

Our Focus

The goals of the Health Equity in the Wake of Continued Climate Change: Leveraging Big Data to Inform Action FRP are to foster and reinforce collaboration across BU, seed innovative new research, accelerate the pace of research and translation, and collectively position BU investigators to be even more competitive for future funding opportunities that address this pressing global challenge.

Focused Research Program led by

  • Gregory Wellenius, Professor of Environmental Health Director, Center for Climate and Health
  • Lucy Hutyra, Professor of Earth & Environment, Director BU Biogeosciences Program, BU URBAN Associate Director Associate, Director for the Initiative on Cities

Research Thrusts

  1. Expanding the Climate Resilience Data Hub

This thrust addresses our goal of making state of the art climate-relevant data essential to research and translation easy to find, use, and share. While unprecedented amounts of data relevant to research in climate and health are widely available, these data are typically only practically accessible to the most sophisticated researchers. As part of the FRP we seek to bring the community of potential users together to better understand their data needs. We will use the first FRP workshop to engage the BU community and key external experts in this discussion. That conversation will then drive how we enhance and streamline the data sharing pipeline in order to increase the pace of climate-related research being conducted at BU and with trusted external collaborators.

  1. Visualizing vulnerability and inequity to inform action

This thrust addresses our goal of developing and implementing the methods required to visualize and quantify spatial variation in vulnerability to climate hazards, the consequent health risks, and their inequitable distribution. Novel insights into within-city or small area variation is of particular interest as insights on this scale are highly relevant to inform local adaptation and public health efforts.

  1. Modeling the health benefits of heat adaptation strategies

This thrust addresses our goal of catalyzing the development of a decision support tool that enables key stakeholders and decision makers to quantify the potential temperature and health benefits of local climate adaptation actions.

 

How to get involved?

For program specific inquiries and questions, please contact FRP leaders: Gregory Wellenius or Lucy Hutyra.

Faculty interested in submitting a Focused Research Programs proposal are strongly encouraged to discuss their ideas with Yannis Paschalidis, director of the Hariri Institute for Computing.

To learn more details about the Hariri Institute’s Focused Research Programs, visit here.