Environmental & Public Health

Lauren Howe shared her insights on collecting and leveraging grantee demographic data in a recent article by Peak Grantmaking: CONNECTing on Tracking Grantee Demographics. Lauren is the Program Administrator for Healthy Food for Denver's Kids and a 2018 Switzer Fellow.

Acres of asphalt parking lots, unshaded roads, dense apartment complexes and neighborhoods with few parks have taken their toll on the poor. As climate change accelerates, low-income districts in the Southwestern United States are 4 to 7 degrees hotter in Fahrenheit — on average — than wealthy neighborhoods in the same metro regions, University of California, Davis, researchers have found in a new analysis.

Switzer Fellow Susannah Lerman, Research Ecologist with the USDA Forest Service, is a co-lead of a partnership with the University of Minnesota that will establish the first urban long-term ecosystem research (LTER) site in the Midwest. Funded by a $7.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul (MSP) Long-Term Ecological Research Program will focus on the dynamics of urban nature and the urban social system in the face of rapid environmental and social change.

Christine Fuller was recently featured on an Atlanta news broadcast about how environmental factors, like pollution, impact the COVID-19 vaccine. Watch the segment

The population of Texas today stands at almost 28 million. By 2050, that number is predicted to nearly double to 55 million, with most people clustered in already-dense urban centers like Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin.Over the next several decades, researchers also project an increase in the frequency and intensity of storms like Hurricane Harvey, as well as more heat, droughts, and floods.

In April of 2019, a team of scientific researchers and documentarians arrived at Mount Everest’s southern basecamp in Nepal to measure the impacts of climate change and human activity on the world’s tallest mountain. The pollution team, led by University of Maine Assistant Professor Kimberley Miner, lugged heavy scientific equipment up the most popular ascent route. At each stop, Miner's team took samples of snow, the same snow climbers were boiling and drinking, the same snow that melted each summer and provided water for people living in the valleys below.

Thawing permafrost is releasing microorganisms, with consequences that are still largely unknown, writes Kimberley Miner in the November issues of Scientific American.

Candice Youngblood has received a $20,000 grant from Aerie to develop Youth on Root, a state-wide youth leadership program focusing on environmental health disparities. Youth on Root seeks to be a healing space and educational resource for high schoolers in low-income communities. The initiative was featured on Forbes magazine's website:

Lauren Richter, Alissa Cordner & Phil Brown, Sociological Perspectives Producing Ignorance Through Regulatory Structure: The Case of Per-and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) Abstract: