Prescription for a Healthier Future: Climate Justice
Carmen Valdez, Ph.D., & Miriam Solis, Ph.D.
Historically marginalized communities experience the most severe consequences of climate change.
To better understand why — and how to solve the problem — UT researchers are looking to some additional experts: community members themselves.
More than 80% of our health is impacted by social determinants — where we live, work, eat and play. And the “live” part is crucial: Everything from air quality, access to healthy food and health care, and economic stability have an outsize impact on a person’s ability to get and stay well. But what happens when climate change begins to threaten those things?
It’s the focus of a team led by Carmen Valdez, Ph.D., associate professor and chief of the Division of Community Engagement and Health Equity in Dell Med’s Department of Population Health, and Miriam Solis, Ph.D., assistant professor in UT’s School of Architecture.
The team is collecting the stories of young people of color in both Austin and the Rio Grande Valley to understand how the consequences of climate change — from adverse weather events like floods to degradation of buildings and other built environments — impact their communities’ health.
In the Rio Grande Valley, they’re also partnering with municipal, nonprofit and grassroots organizations in coalition-building, creating local capacity to act on youth stories. It’s all part of the Planet Texas 2050 grand challenge in UT’s Bridging Barriers program; interdisciplinary research teams are exploring solutions to threats posed by a rapidly increasing population alongside the effects of climate change.
“What’s important is that, as a research team, we’re not the ones coming up with a particular solution,” says Solis, who focuses on race and the built environment, particularly as it relates to urban planning. “That would be impossible to accomplish because the problems are so intersectional. Instead, we are working with coalition members and young people to identify environmental responses. An ideal outcome is that they will be actively engaged in implementing these ideas over the years to come.”
The Process of Engagement
Using a tool called Photovoice, the team shows participants how to take photos of neighborhood spaces like parks, then interviews them about environmental threats they see in those spaces, and why or how those environments impact their health. Photovoice also collects participants’ ideas for safer or healthier environments. Once the narratives are collected, the team plans to assist coalitions in pursuing small-scale projects to help communities better meet their own health needs.
“Young people have bold ideas, and a capacity for pursuing change that adults don’t often have,” says Valdez, who is also an associate professor in UT’s Steve Hicks School of Social Work. “We’ve already seen teenage participants pursuing smaller changes in their own lives, like advocating to build shade structures at bus stops in their neighborhood. It’s important for us as community-based researchers not to just collect a bunch of data and walk away, but to really invest time in building these relationships and engagements.”