SACE recently had the privilege of attending the 2015 HHS Climate Justice Conference in Raleigh, N.C. hosted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The conference was a unique space to hear directly from some of the low-income communities and communities of color that are most vulnerable to climate disruption, and to hear from federal officials working to anticipate, analyze, and mitigate a wide variety of public health impacts. We are particularly excited to share three of the data-based tools communities, researchers, public health practitioners, and advocates can utilize to organize and advocate for policies that will increase community resilience to climate change impacts.
The Interagency Crosscutting Group on Climate Change and Human Health (CCHHG) presented the Climate Data Initiative, Metadata Access Tool for Climate and Health, and Climate Resilience Toolkit which together represent thousands of datasets and resources that can empower communities with tools and knowledge to plan for future and present climate disruptions.
The Climate Data Initiative is an ever-growing one-stop shop for the federal government’s datasets related to the impacts of climate change. Datasets and resources are broken into themes that provide a depth of information on climate change impacts to:
- human health, including changes to precipitation and heat patterns and changes to disease patterns;
- food resilience, including the impacts of a changing climate on “food security;”
- water, including changes to the availability of our most precious resource;
- ecosystem vulnerability, including wildfire patterns, biodiversity, and changes to the habitats of invasive species;
- transportation, including the impacts of climate change on transportation infrastructure; and
- coastal flooding, including what rising sea levels will mean for coastal communities.
By compiling and making these datasets and resources available on one site, federal agencies hope to “…stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship in support of national climate change preparedness.” We’re encouraged to see that the datasets available on the site continue to grow.
Metadata Access Tool for Climate and Health (MATCH)
CCHHG created MATCH under the rationale that increasing cross-disciplinary understandings of the human health impacts of climate change will make the development of climate mitigation strategies more efficient and effective. A huge amount of research has been conducted already by federal agencies on climate change, but this data is often difficult to locate and lacks common summary language that could help researchers, policy-makers, and public health professionals identify relationships between datasets. MATCH contextualizes over 9,000 federal datasets on a wide variety of topics related to human health and climate.
We hope that this tool will accelerate the cross-disciplinary research on climate change needed to create more holistic responses to its impacts in communities across the Southeast and in the U.S. more broadly.
Originally developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in partnership with several federal agencies, the Climate Resilience Toolkit provides tools for U.S. communities to better understand their risks related to climate change. The site includes a 5-step framework for understanding and analyzing problems and includes a number of case studies where communities from Southern California to South Carolina to New England have identified challenges related to climate change and developed innovative solutions to increase their communities’ resilience. Users can browse over 150 data tools filtered by functionality or by topics which include:
- coastal flood risk
- food resilience
- water resources
- transportation and supply chain
- tribal nations
- human health
Many communities, especially communities of color and low-income communities, will continue to grapple with the inevitable disruptions and impacts caused by our historic and continued burning of fossil fuels for energy. We hope that these data tools will support and strengthen smart planning and preparation locally for climate disruption. We also hope researchers, advocates, policy-makers, health practitioners and communities will use these tools to advocate for a clean energy economy as the best way to protect the health and well-being of our communities now and in the future.