Evaluating community-led interventions to maximise the health and well-being of climate change adaptations for extreme events: Phase 1
Research Team: Neil Adger, Catherine Butler, Emma Bland, Gordon Walker, Patricia Albers, Matthew Cotton
Who's involved: University of Exeter, LiLaC, University of Bristol, Fuse (Teesside University)
This project will evaluate how places and populations can be made healthier through community-led actions aimed at addressing the impacts of climate change, for example responding to extreme weather events. This will help inform local authority public health planning and policy to maximise people’s health and wellbeing.
Extreme weather events like floods and heatwaves are increasing in the UK due to climate change. This project will assess the impact of community led interventions in responding to extreme weather events and how these help maintain health and wellbeing.
This project is now in its Phase 2
Background
Extreme weather events such as floods and heatwaves are increasing in the UK due to climate change. The government has recognised this as a major risk to health and an important focus for public health policy and action. While climate change impact related health risks are commonly managed through formal, institution led planning, bottom-up community led actions play an increasingly important role that have been found to facilitate and extend formal interventions.
Aim
This project aims to evaluate how groups of people within diverse communities can act to reduce the health and mental health consequences of floods, heatwaves, and cold waves. Community-led action in preventing flood impacts, and in helping to deal with heatwaves or extreme cold weather, can keep people safe and reduce the health burden especially on vulnerable or hard to reach populations. However, the benefits of community-led action are not well understood. This project seeks to learn lessons from how community action has worked in the past and evaluate what works well and what doesn’t.
Design and methods
This research will first investigate the nature and extent of past and current community-led actions and gather evidence about how they have been effective in preventing and reducing public health burdens.
The second part will involve an in-depth evaluation of three ongoing case studies of community action to prevent avoidable health burdens associated with floods, heatwaves and extreme cold weather.
Public involvement
In the first year of the project, a range of activities and workshops will take place to capture the views and experiences of the public and community groups. We will work closely with the Health and Environment Public Engagement Group (convened by Kath Maguire in Exeter) as well as the NIHR Health Determinants Research Collaboration for the South Tees area.
Dissemination
In the later stages of the project, dissemination will take place through professional conferences to engage with the scientific community as well as meetings and events for members of the public, community groups and local authorities. Throughout the project we will explore other ways to engage with audiences on a wider level.
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