Santa Cruz Climate Action Stories ESRI screenshot.
Community communication and media representations of local climate actions are mostly either absent or insufficient globally. When climate change is covered, representations focus on climate impacts providing incomplete information about how people can act to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The Climate Health Equity Partnerships (CHEP) are using geospatial tools to improve the regionalization and visualization of existing climate actions. Using localized visualizations increases the agency of local communities to respond to the climate crisis and allows as many segments of the community as possible to access the information. Climate and health are sometimes perceived as separate topics with separate stakeholders and disconnected solutions. CHEP supports connecting climate and health together by creating an easy-to-use visual display of climate actions. CHEP will improve upon a prototyped interactive interface where the public can upload photos and short descriptions using an online GIS tool which will support diverse science centers and museums to work with members of their communities to document and visualize local planetary health action.
Two pilot efforts—one by the starting California Central Coast team and another repeated by a group in Oxfordshire, UK—have provided a proof of concept by using GIS to invite community members to share positive climate-based actions, which are then showcased on an interactive map. These projects provide users with a link to a form for them to submit images and descriptions of their actions, as well as their locations. For example, users have uploaded images of a community garden, use of public transportation, and zero-waste repair shops and markets. Their entries are added to an interactive map which others can use to explore the types of actions taking place, with tools to toggle between categories such as building electrification/efficiency and transportation. In this way, community members can learn more about the people taking local actions, and where actions are taking place.
The existing prototype is a highly adaptable platform. For example, the portal to share actions can be included as a link or QR code on websites or social media posts, shared during in-person or virtual events, added to fliers and distributed throughout a community, or loaded on tablets that are available to visitors.
CHEP will leverage the existing platform that allows users to upload photos and descriptions of a wide range of climate actions and uses a geospatial-based tool to highlight where each action took place. By providing tailored guidance and the necessary infrastructure, the project partners will enable science centers and museums to incorporate this tool in a range of programs, in turn facilitating conversations about solutions that build a sense of active hope and invite and inspire community-level action.
CHEP will support science centers or museums to embed the platform in existing programming (e.g., field trip programs, summer camps) or communications (e.g., social media) to invite their community members to share instances of local action. They will create a beta “how-to” guide with directions for collecting the examples and using them as a springboard for group conversations. The team will be available to problem-solve with science center staff as needed.
CHEP will collect feedback and outcomes from participating science centers through interviews, focus groups, and/or surveys. For example, they will seek to better understand the contexts in which the platform was used, what worked well, and what challenges they encountered. These insights will inform subsequent iterations of the project and will be shared alongside the platform and how-to guide at conferences such as the ASTC annual conference and AGU Annual Meeting. This project can be implemented at different scales, each with corresponding resource requirements and outcomes.
Mission: To (1) raise awareness of, advocate for, and collaboratively adopt equitable policies and practices that promote health and climate equity, and (2) improve coordination for regionalized climate, health, and equity work.
Goals:
Additional details about this work can be found at:
Goals for Phase Two include:
Santa Cruz Regional Climate and Health Equity Partnerships started as an advisory committee for the Climate Action Plan for the City of Santa Cruz, CA. While the CHEP framework project began with a Central Coast focus, it was also a pilot program to create a systemized tool for message coordination that can be scaled up nationally and internationally, supporting ongoing health equity work on many levels. The goal was 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, the team hoped to improve both regional coordination and visualization of climate, health, and equity issues. The project planned to synchronize efforts to more rapidly move climate, health, and equity projects into service. The project team anticipated that the CHEP framework could be customized for any region and at any scale.
The project has gained the support of the Seeding Action team at the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC). As of February 2023, 51 science centers and museums have joined Seeding Action. Phase Two of the project will expand the climate action mapping prototype to explore the implementation of these tools for coordination through science centers as regional hubs.
Scientist Role
We are looking for a scientist to help build, maintain, and analyze a database of climate actions for users to submit photos, text, and location information and adapt the interface in response to user feedback. The scientist should also be able to review and analyze the submissions. This work may lead to scientific publication. The scientist should be able to relate with climate and health considerations and participate in community engagement, and 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 know about the creation of forms where users can enter photos and GPS locations as well as text so they can be displayed on a map and how to construct the back-end of a site that displays user input and to help us to adapt the interface in response to user feedback. Additionally, if possible, we would like the scientist to help us review the results of the project for scientific publication to shape the direction of future work. We welcome scientists who may be supported by graduate researchers.
Desired Skills and Qualifications:
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.
