Grant aims to boost local capacity to tackle extreme heat and poor air quality

A local grant will fund efforts to build capacity to understand and respond to health impacts from extreme heat and poor air quality, Jen said at the meeting.

“This grant is all about building our capacity at the local level and understanding more about how climate change impacts our communities' health and how together we can put in some things that will help us be more resilient in the face of climate change,” Jen said, describing the program’s aims.

Asked about specific concerns, Jen pointed to rising extreme heat and worsening air quality. “As you can see in the trends for the past couple of years, there's been increase in extreme heat events,” she said, adding that those events have produced a range of health effects.

Jen said staff used data pulled in collaboration with emergency departments to track visits tied to heat- and air-related symptoms while preparing the grant application. “When we were applying for this grant, we actually were able to pull these data um, in collaboration with the emergency departments to see how many of those ER visits were related to these particular symptoms and what is the need and for the response for the planning that we don't have right now,” she said.

The discussion in the provided transcript focused on the grant’s goals and the need for planning and response capacity; no formal vote or specific funding amounts were recorded in the excerpt.