Washington, DC, June 9, 2020 —The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), representing the country’s nearly 3,000 local health departments, has announced its 2020 Climate and Health Adaptation Demonstration Sites. The program is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

NACCHO awarded the New Orleans Department of Health, LA and Alameda County Public Health Department, CA with $18,000 each to supplement ongoing climate change and health adaptation initiatives in local health departments.

The New Orleans Department of Health is using the grant to expand the New Orleans Heat Monitoring Pilot Project to two additional neighborhoods and take a deeper look at local heat data from EMS and hospitals to better gauge the types of individuals being most adversely affected by heat. This project will allow the New Orleans Department of Health to alert residents when temperatures are dangerously hot, as well as query residents about their health and daily life impacts of urban heat in real time. Also, they will be able to more effectively target solutions and interventions, engage in community outreach around the impacts of extreme heat, and catalyze neighbor-to-neighbor networks to support emergency preparedness during extreme weather.

Alameda County Public Health Department is using the grant to build on prior wildfire smoke resilience work, including Alameda County’s multilingual smoke advisory materials. Through this project, they will conduct focus groups to develop a community engagement report of preferred methods of communication about air quality levels and protective actions. They will also evaluate and test existing wildfire smoke message templates for different audiences and develop a list of trusted agents in the community to send out wildfire smoke messages.

For more information on NACCHO’s climate change work, visit NACCHO’s climate change webpage.

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About NACCHO
The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) represents the nation’s nearly 3,000 local health departments. These city, county, metropolitan, district, and tribal departments work every day to protect and promote health and well-being for all people in their communities. For more information about NACCHO, please visit www.naccho.org.