Aging and Health in a Changing Climate

PROJECT SUMMARY Older adults are particularly vulnerable to health impacts from climate-related events such as heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods. These impacts include both physical and mental health such as experiencing higher overall rates of mortality, likelihood of injury, disruption of medical treatments, and the experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Understanding these disproportionate impacts is particularly important given projections of a climate future with more frequent and more intense environmental extremes. Yet progress in research on the Aging-Climate-Health nexus has been slowed by disciplinary silos and data challenges. The proposed virtual Center on Aging, Climate, and Health (CACHE) responds directly to these challenges by taking a multi-pronged approach to the development of infrastructure to accelerate research advancements. The development of CACHE will take place in two phases with Years 1-2 (R61) involving several demonstration research projects integrating social and environmental data and the development of a strong online presence to facilitate sharing of data, code, and training materials in support of interdisciplinary scholarship. While a large amount of long-term climate and disaster data are publicly available, they are in formats unfamiliar to health and social scientists and, thus, require technical and substantive expertise to use. CACHE will offer the necessary training and resources to overcome these substantial barriers. During this initial phase, the Center will also recruit an interdisciplinary affiliate base through outreach efforts involving its Executive Committee and Advisory Board that represents environmental demography, aging, health, and climate science. A proof-of-concept training session on climate data will be offered prior to the end of Year 2. In Years 3-5 (R33), we build on this foundational work by expanding to offer additional trainings on multi-scale social-environmental analysis, data visualization, and other important methodological topics, while also further developing the Center’s blog to publicly grapple with research challenges in this arena. CACHE will also offer seed grants to support the early stages of promising research and, in support of building an interdisciplinary community, will provide funding for topical workshops to bring together scholars interested in critical areas with knowledge gaps. Yearly mini conferences offer a space to share ideas, provide feedback, and identify important questions and collaborative opportunities. In all, the work emphasizes the bridging of data platforms and the crossing of interdisciplinary silos to bring multiple disciplinary perspectives to bear within the increasingly important topical area of Aging, Climate, and Health.