Our goal is to inform climate action policies for health that strengthen local adaptive capacity, reduce vulnerability, and increase resilience across the life course.

The CLIMA Center will create strong transdisciplinary research teams, capacity, and culture urgently needed to assess the complex, cascading impacts of extreme weather hazards and exposures on health resiliency and adaptive capacity over the life course, starting with cardiovascular health and disease as a sentinel public health burden.

A Methods Development Research Core (MDRC) will develop innovative, highly spatiotemporally resolved models of exposure to urban heat islands, wildfire smoke, and increasingly frequent, concurrently, or consecutively occurring compound weather events and investigate their overlap with neighborhood adaptation strategies (e.g., air conditioning use, tree canopy shade, greening interventions) and vulnerabilities (power outages) to identify priorities for increasing climate resilience.

The Community Engagement Core (CEC) will facilitate solution-oriented translational research and multi-directional communication with policymakers and the public. It will engage local communities using an intergenerational approach, including community participatory action research and education to engage youth in the co-design, monitoring, and ground-truthing of adaptation strategies.