Managing the Public Health Impacts of Climate Change in Cambridge

The City of Cambridge faces daunting climate change-related risks. The health impacts of local climate changes are likely to be devastating if no action is taken to prepare. A team led by Professor Lawrence Susskind is investigating new ways of helping the city formulate public health risk management plans. Research Assistants, Hannah Susan Payne and Genea Foster have created a new role play simulation that the Science Impact Collaborative team will use to engage numerous stakeholder groups. The team expects to use a new tool called Justify — created by Professor Henry Lieberman, Mr. Christopher Frye and research staff at the MIT Media Lab and CSAIL— to engage business leaders, university administrators, religious leaders, environmental activists and other organizational players in Cambridge in a careful review of various strategies for dealing with rising temperatures and heat island effects. If the role play simulation using Justify proves effective, the SIC team will work with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to engage still other cities and towns in preparing climate health impact assessments and health risk management plans.

Conceptualizing Coastal Flood Risks in New England

Between urbanization, economic growth, and climate change, coastal cities are facing increasing flood damage. Despite having technically accurate flood risk forecasts, communities in New England have taken few if any steps to reduce future risks. We believe that there are substantial differences in the way stakeholder groups and technical experts conceptualize the flood risks their communities race, and how they can reduce those risks. We hypothesize that these differences present critical barriers to reaching agreement and taking collective action. In this research, we are conducting stakeholder assessments in coastal New England towns to examine differences in how stakeholder groups conceptualize flood risks. We are comparing the results of this analysis with a review of the approaches that each community has taken towards collective flood risk management. This research is aimed at helping local governments build their capacity to overcome perceptual differences and take action to become more flood resilient.

The New England Climate Adaptation Project

In conjunction with the National Estuary Research Reserve System (NERRS) of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Science Impact Collaborative has spent three years documenting the ways in which municipal efforts to manage climate risks in four New England states can be supported through the use of collaboratively produced risk assessments, stakeholder assessments, and widespread public engagement in tailored role-play simulations.  We hope, next, to be working with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to assist clusters of local public health departments in their efforts to analyze the public health risks associated with climate change and engage the public in adaptation planning efforts.