Active Climate, Earth & Environment Clean Energy

Making extreme weather health impacts visible through household energy, climate, and sustainability policies in frontline communities

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations Boston University · Dialogue Earth Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £2.5M
Period Jan 2025 — Jan 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

In three US cities—Boston, New Orleans, and Phoenix—researchers are mapping which neighbourhoods face the deadliest heat and connecting those residents directly to policymakers who control energy and climate funding. Extreme heat kills more Americans each year than any other weather hazard, yet the policies meant to protect people—from home cooling subsidies to tree-planting programmes—are often designed in isolation from one another. Frontline communities, typically low-income and non-white, bear the brunt of these gaps. The team will combine satellite temperature data, household energy records, and interviews with residents to create a detailed picture of who gets hot, why, and what existing policies could help. If successful, the project will produce a visual risk tool that lets city officials see, for example, how expanding a weatherisation programme in a specific Phoenix block could reduce emergency room visits during a heatwave. It will also link siloed sustainability and housing policies so that investments in green roofs, energy assistance, and cooling centres reinforce each other rather than working at cross-purposes. The goal is not a single new technology but a practical decision-making framework that makes heat-health inequities visible and actionable for the local governments that control the levers of change.

View original technical description
Our goal is to reduce heat-related health impacts for frontline urban communities, focusing on climate, sustainability, and household energy policies in the U.S. Our aims are: 1) synthesize the U.S. landscape of climate, sustainability, and household energy policies that impact extreme temperature resilience, and investigate the Global South landscape; 2) map local heat vulnerability data and elevate the lived experience of residents of frontline communities in three U.S. cities: Boston, New Orleans, and Phoenix; 3) Pilot a new extreme temperature-health risk tool to visualize the benefits of interventions, and expand local networks in Boston, New Orleans, and Phoenix, engaging with local government, stakeholders, residents, and community organizations, and 4) make temperature-related health risks and corresponding solutions more visible through local and global communications and engagement with key stakeholders, in collaboration with China Dialogue Trust. We will leverage our transdisciplinary team’s experience in community engaged climate & health research and communications, data from the BUSPH Climate and Health Center, and multi-city partnerships to raise visibility of the adverse climate-related impacts of extreme temperatures on health, delivering tools for decision makers to quantify impacts, and create pathways to connect siloed policies to improve heat related health inequities in frontline communities.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Maria Fabian (EPMC Awardee)Sam Geall (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Exposing Hidden Heat: Mapping Heat-Driven Health Disparities and Advancing Policy Implications for Climate-Resilient Urban Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Co-developed Environmental Solutions to Mitigate the Impact of Temperature Extremes on the Health of Vulnerable Populations
A Community Co-design Weatherization and Microgrid Plan for an Equitable Energy Security and Environmental Health
Urban Heat Sensing: Mitigating, and adapting to, heat-related climate risks by empowering citizens via Assistive AI and Next Generation Digital Twins
The effects of extreme heat events on mental health in vulnerable urban communities: towards evidence-based policy and practice

Original classification

Climate Impacts Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.