Austin Public Health (APH) coordinates with the City of Austin’s Office of Resilience and Office of Sustainability on climate change issues. Although the City of Austin has had a Climate Equity Plan for many years, it initially focused on infrastructure. However, recent climate-related disasters have highlighted the impact on public health. As a result, many people are seeking data, information, and guidance from APH’s epidemiology and public health preparedness programs, viewing climate change as a “disaster”.
This led to the realization that there is a need for a common language around climate change and a place for health department staff to discuss what it means from our department’s perspective. In the long term, this will allow us to engage with the community in a unified voice.
In response to this need, APH is in the process of developing a Climate and Health Committee, a collaborative team comprised of Climate and Health Champions within APH to:
- Develop common language around climate change at APH
- Increase comfort talking about climate change
- Increase conversations around climate change in APH and to the public
- Identify public health interventions (existing and new)
- Develop an APH Climate and Health Adaptation Plan to support the City’s Climate Equity Plan
- Conduct disease burden modeling
- Quantify the additional burden of health outcomes associated with climate change
- Vector borne, population change, and disaster implications
The planning team used the Building Resilience Against Climate Effects (BRACE) framework and NACCHO’s Guide to Climate and Health Programs. To outline the committee’s purpose for the proposal to executive leadership.
The first step was to identify where APH fell within NACCHO’s Guide to Climate and Health Programs. We realized that we had Climate and Health Champions who were already learning and incorporating climate knowledge into their work in small ways, and we wanted to bring those people together. We needed to identify the Champions from various programs. After presenting the proposed Climate and Health Committee to leadership, they requested volunteers from their respective programs. The identified Climate and Health Champions completed the NACCHO Climate Ambassador training and agreed to dedicate 4 hours a month to work on climate change. No extra funding is currently available, but cumulatively people spending even half a day each month on climate change work can make a difference.
The first meeting was held in the spring of 2024. The small committee is made up of Climate and Health Champions with a range of experience and roles (community health workers, emergency planners, epidemiologists, IT specialists, environmental health analyst, assistant directors and the health authority) and each person is interested and willing to work together to help move forward with this collaboration. The Committee dedicated the following months to building upon their climate knowledge. Eventually, the Climate and Health Committee plans to invite speakers to share expertise with staff and develop sub-committees to tackle different approaches and interventions. The committee is in the beginning stages, but existing work that’s been done and resources like NACCHO’s Guide to Climate and Health Programs, will allow us to have a framework and focus as the program is developed.
Contact Information
Ashley Hawes, MPH
[email protected]
Austin Public Health, Texas