Santa Cruz Climate Action Stories ESRI screenshot.
Community communication and media representations of local climate actions are mostly either absent or insufficient globally. The Climate Health Equity Partners (CHEP) are using GIS tools to improve the regionalization and visualization of existing climate actions. Using visualizations allows the team to expand awareness of the needs and opportunities related to the climate crisis, locally or otherwise, to as many segments of the community as possible. To some, climate and health are currently mostly seen as separate topics with separate stakeholders and disconnected solutions. CHEP intends to connect climate and health together and create an easy-to-use visual display of climate actions happening in our community. CHEP will also create an Interactive interface where the public can upload photos and short descriptions using an online GIS tool.
Santa Cruz Regional Climate and Health Equity Partnerships will be an advisory committee for the Climate Action Plan for the City of Santa Cruz. Our goal is to develop a framework for regionalizing climate action. The CHEP framework includes a geospatial mapping tool and synchronized messaging system to improve coordination among climate, health, and equity efforts. Through a network of communities sharing the CHEP framework, we hope to improve both regional coordination and visualization of climate, health, and equity issues. We plan to synchronize efforts so that we can more rapidly move climate, health and equity projects into service. Importantly, the CHEP framework can be customized for any region and at any scale.
The Community would like to improve visualizations of existing climate actions and engage the wider Santa Cruz population so that they can actively participate which will result in higher levels of engagement leading to positive climate actions.
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This project is intended to be completed in a maximum of 18 months.
Emily Coren, Stanford Psychiatry and Psychology, Science Communication
Krista Myers, MS, Louisiana State University, Earth Science
Nathan Uchtmann, Physician
Nightingale Uchtmann, Nurse
Jennie Dusheck, MA, Author, Freelance Science Writer & Editor
Nancy Glock-Grueneich, Participant in the Santa Cruz Climate Action task force
Aviva Wolf-Jacobs, PhD student, Spatial Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California
Jason Maitland
We are looking for a scientist that has the capacity to work with in a growing relationship. The scientist should be able to relate with climate and health considerations. The scientist will participate in community engagement, community mapping and contribute to inspiring and empowering diverse and representative citizen science. The scientist is not required to be local to the community and remote engagement is acceptable. The person should have knowledge of the creation of forms where users can input photos and GPS locations as well as text so they can be displayed on a map. We welcome scientist who may be supported by graduate researchers.
Thriving Earth Exchange asks all scientific partners to work with the community to help define a project with concrete local impact to which they can contribute as pro-bono volunteers and collaborators. This work can also position the scientists and communities to seek additional funding, together, for the next stage.
