Achi news desk-
A research team from the University of Alberta is creating maps that will show how the health risks of climate change affect different regions.
“Climate change, because it’s so big and amorphous, feels impossible to tackle,” said Sammy Lowe, research leader of the Climate, Health and Environmental Epidemiology Research (CHEER) laboratory. “But, although we can measure these health effects, there are actually things we can do to tackle them today.”
The project examines how different areas are more or less vulnerable to chronic health conditions caused or exacerbated by climate hazards.
The health conditions include things like respiratory illness, mental health issues, cardiovascular disease and dementia. It is also a factor in the demographics of different areas, as socio-economic status and age can make someone more or less at risk. And finally, the maps consider resources in the area that help to mitigate these negative effects.
“We take a bunch of different factors and distill them into three main areas that we call the main domains,” Lowe explained.
Those areas are exposure, sensitivity and adaptation.
“The exposure zone is… your level of exposure to things like air pollutants, temperature, precipitation, icy conditions.
“The second domain is sensitivity. These are factors that could worsen or improve your exposure … such as access to housing, income levels, age distribution,” said Lowe.
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“The last domain is on the flip side… adaptive capacity: your ability to mitigate some of those negative effects. You can think of adaptive capacity as things like access to green spaces and parks or air conditioning systems or the number of health clinics or community services nearby.
“If your sensitivity is very high and your exposure is high and your adaptability is low, that’s kind of the worst-case scenario.”
University of Alberta health climate change maps.
Courtesy: University of Alberta
The researchers have already created a map of Edmonton as a pilot project.
“We find that people who live in the western and southern parts of the city have much more exposure to smog and air pollution and direct heat, while people who live closer to the river, in the middle the city, sometimes proving significant. lower levels of exposure,” Lowe said.
“The effects of climate, air pollution, temperature are not constant across the city,” Lowe added. “Based on that, how can we tailor approaches to help mitigate the health impacts that are perhaps going to be more relevant to Westmount, or Ellerslie or north Edmonton or downtown?”
This new project will expand on that — looking across the province.
“In the rural areas, we think (about) a wide range of nature and lots of green space, so they must be doing well, but when we think about their access to services health and different mitigation abilities, that’s typically a lot. less common in these rural areas,” explained Lowe.
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“We really want to draw people’s attention, but also to stakeholders, governments, health care providers, that when we think about the health of our populations, we cannot separate that from the climate. This is something that is really relevant now and on the contrary, on the positive side, it is now actionable.
“Say you have this tree planting initiative. It seems that these particular areas are going to have the biggest impact, but in this other area, they actually have a lot of green space, but we need to work more on transport accessibility to different centers health, for example.”
All the data that goes into creating the index is publicly available. Lowe says it comes from provincial and national environmental laboratories, meteorological data and census Canada.
The team hope that the information shown in the maps will help governments create policy, and guide and inspire decisions by industry, community groups and individuals.
“I know sometimes the picture that’s painted can be a bit grim, but there are these really important, grassroots, community level actions that we can take today, and we’re taking a lot of today , that, when scaled up to the population level, can have very positive effects on our health,” said Lowe.
& copy 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
