GW received a multimillion dollar grant from a government institute last month to lead a cross-university initiative to research the connections between climate change and public health.
The Research and Engagement for Action in Climate and Health Center received a three-year, $3.69 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences starting Sept. 1 to research ways to mitigate the public health effects of climate change. Gaige Kerr, an assistant research professor of environmental and occupational health and co-director of the administrative core of the center, said the links between climate change and public health are understudied, and the center hopes to raise awareness among policymakers of the health impacts certain climate phenomena, like increased greenhouse gas emissions, can have.
“We’re trying to build capacity within these often siloed or disparate communities, the climate community and then the health community,” Kerr said. “And not just building capacity, but doing novel research that advances our understanding of climate-sensitive health outcomes.”
Susan Anenberg, a professor and the chair of environmental and occupational health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health, serves as the director of the center, which operates in collaboration with Howard and George Mason universities and the Environmental Defense Fund — a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. The center is divided into administrative, developmental, community engagement and exposure assessment cores or sections, each tasked with overseeing different aspects of the center’s activities, including the training of researchers, involvement of D.C. community members and management of data.
Kerr said the administrative core consists of the leadership of the organization, including Anenberg and Kerr, and the developmental core will focus on training researchers on how to research this issue and awarding grants and student fellowships to research teams. Throughout the three-year grant, the community engagement core will meet with climate change activists in the D.C. community to gain their input into the research, and the exposure assessment core will consolidate the climate and health data into an accessible and interpretable format for researchers.
Kerr said the exposure assessment core of the center will utilize the large amounts of climate data researchers receive from satellites and format it in a way that makes sense for health researchers to interpret and consolidate the data into a manageable size, so it can be easily studied.
“This core is hoping to take some of the pressure off of investigators who have to learn about a new data set, format it in a way that works for them,” Kerr said.
Kerr said the National Institute of Health classifies the center as an “exploratory center,” which means its main goal is to train researchers in the D.C. area to do interdisciplinary research that combines public health and climate change with the hopes that it will inspire future related work.
“We want to build up the resources and results needed to continue getting funding for this really important work through other types of centers,” Kerr said. “So we’re not just producing these research outputs and bringing people together. We’re also trying to build capacity amongst our team so that we’re able to continue this work beyond this one brand.”
The center will fund two internal projects throughout the three-year grant. The first project will be directed by Kelvin Fong, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at GW, and will focus on assessing the benefits of congestion pricing, an increased fee or toll levied on certain roads in urban areas that aim to decrease traffic congestion, in D.C. The second project will be led by Katie Applebaum, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health, and will research how end-stage kidney disease patients have been impacted by climate change, according to a University release.
Fong said the project — which will span the three years of the grant — aims to monitor the changes of emissions of particles that often come from vehicles and that can be harmful to humans like nitrogen dioxide and ozone. He added that the project will be considering the effects that emissions have on low-income communities, who tend to live closer to highways and major roadways.
“We know that road traffic emissions tend to affect more marginalized neighborhoods more than wealthier neighborhoods,” Fong said. “So another aspect of this research project, one is when we’re exploring the different health effects, we’re also looking to map the different impacts on neighborhoods around D.C., with a special focus on highlighting the potential attacks in more disenfranchised neighborhoods.”
Zhengtian Xu, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at GW and a researcher on Fong’s project, said the project will use a travel demand forecasting model, which provides estimates of traffic congestion in the D.C. area, to predict traffic patterns in certain areas around D.C. to determine where congestion pricing would be the most effective in reducing traffic. He said an environmental team will then assess how much greenhouse gas emissions will decrease based on the predicted reductions in traffic.
“What we will do is we’re going to deploy this state-of-the-art traffic demand model that were developed by the D.C. transportation planning agencies and then we are going to change, for example, as per the policies that were identified,” Xu said. “So we’re going to change the price that were on the different road segments and then predict the traffic dynamics.”
Robert Orttung, a research professor of international affairs at GW and director of the developmental core of the REACH Center, said this core will train faculty from GW and the other universities involved in the project through workshops and seminars to study the interdisciplinary link between climate and health.
“The basic idea is to develop the faculty who are going to be doing all these research projects to have the skills to be able to work on them,” Orttung said. “So that could be everything from helping them make connections with each other, like the climate scientists and the health scientists, to helping them develop ways to work with different communities.”
Orttung said the core will form research teams consisting of both climate and health researchers and the partner schools and will work with the community engagement core to have community members — which he said could be anyone ranging from leaders of environmental nonprofits or “ordinary people” facing climate-related health issues — present in discussions of what the core will focus their research on.
“Our research should be driven by the problems that they’re dealing with due to climate change and trying to make sure that we’re not just doing research for the sake of research, but it’s really community oriented and focused on getting practical solutions,” Orttung said.
Orttung said the developmental core will use the grant funding to give two $40,000 pilot awards to separate research teams from the participating institutions each year of the grant. He said climate and health scientists in the D.C. community will be able to apply for these grants to fund research related to the goals of the center, and the center also aims to award smaller fellowships to fund student research at the participating universities.
“It’s good to integrate students with their new knowledge into research projects as well,” Orttung said. “So we’re hoping to tap into both the faculty and the student knowledge bases at GW and the other two universities as well.”
