Spatial variability of public health vulnerabilities: Interactions between climate, the built environment, and social determinants of health
Abstract
Urban areas are now home to more than half of the world's population with this number expected to increase to more than two-thirds by 2050. The process of urbanization is accompanied by a suite of surface modifications that alter energy flows, including the replacement of soil and vegetation with impervious surfaces like concrete and asphalt, producing novel ecosystems whose dynamics are controlled by coupled human-natural systems. Climate change will interact with urban microclimates, affecting ecosystem service provision and amplifying risk for people, economies, and the environment. Understanding urban areas requires an interdisciplinary, systems-based approach. Urban processes are complex and nonlinear and operate across a variety of spatial and temporal scales, with dynamic feedbacks between physical, social, and institutional systems.
Urban landscapes are highly heterogeneous, with unevenly distributed social, economic, and infrastructure resources, and the impacts of climate change will likewise be uneven. Effective and equitable planning and mitigation requires understanding these distributions and how vulnerability is related to various social and environmental factors. The University of Kansas is a research partner of KC Health CORE, a collaborative initiative between Children's Mercy Hospital and the Center for Economic Information at the University of Missouri, Kansas City created to investigate the geographic disparity of health outcomes. We are using address-level children's asthma data from 2000-2012 to investigate how climate, the built environment, and social determinants of health interact to produce uneven landscapes of public health vulnerabilities in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. Our research will develop techniques to incorporate disparate datasets in statistically robust models and to provide outcomes useful to officials in a planning and governance context.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMGC21H1414W
- Keywords:
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- 3307 Boundary layer processes;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 0414 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions;
- GLOBAL CHANGE