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Linear urban forest’ project aims to mitigate heat, improve health in cities

June 28, 2024 – In mid-May, a group of Springfield, Mass. residents gathered in a downtown meeting room to view, on a big screen, computer-generated visualizations of what streets in the Upper Hill neighborhood would look like with a lot more trees and vegetation—and what the potential health benefits would be. The presentation—a “design charette” to share work and gather feedback—was given by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Linda…

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Reames receives Michigan Chronicle’s Men of Excellence award

University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) Tishman Professor of Environmental Justice, Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainability and Detroit Sustainability Clinic Director Tony G. Reames received a Michigan Chronicle Men of Excellence award last week at the 17th Annual Men of Excellence Awards and Induction Ceremony in Detroit. Each year, the Michigan Chronicle provides Men and Women of Excellence awards to outstanding African American men and women who have made significant contributions…

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A Glimpse of Fellows’ Recent Publications, Spring 2024

Despite improvements in water access, over two billion people lack safe drinking water. Katherine Alfredo’s study shows that while taste thresholds for chlorine in rural Indigenous Ngäbe and Latino Panamanians are higher than recommended levels, taste aversion is not a major barrier to adopting chlorinated water in these communities. In recognition of the importance of ethics in environmental epidemiology, Ethics Guidelines were established in 1996 and adopted by the International…

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Socially vulnerable people and stormwater infrastructure: A geospatial exploration of the equitable distribution of gray and green infrastructure in Washington D.C.

Green Infrastructure (GI) has gained recognition for its notable role in climate change mitigation and urban resilience. Meanwhile, there is a growing body of literature revealing the uneven distribution of GI from environmental justice perspective. Given the role of GI, the distribution should also be explored in a social vulnerability context and combining green and gray infrastructure. However, the distribution of GI, sewer pipelines, and their relationship with social vulnerability…

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Federal Housing Programs Protect Residents from Lead Exposure

Americans already living in housing supported by federal housing assistance programs have significantly lower blood lead levels than counterparts who would later join these programs, according to new research led by environmental health scientists at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Tufts Medical Center. The findings appear in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives(link is external and opens in a new window). “Living in federally-supported housing—especially public housing—limited opportunities…

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On the Social Side of the Climate Crisis

On Thursday, The Eastern Sociological Society (ESS) kicked off their annual conference at SIS, co-sponsored by CECE, American Institutes for Research, Deloitte, the MacArthur Foundation, Science Advances, AU’s School of International Service, The Department of Environment Development and Health, and the Hewlett Foundation. This was a significant landmark for ESS, because under the leadership of SIS Professor and CECE Director, Dr. Dana Fisher, 2024 was the first year that the topic of…

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Slow violence to disasters: Exploring racialized topographies and contextualizing social vulnerability to flood and other environmental risks

In traditional disaster scholarship, social vulnerability is a framework that leverages individual variables to explore stratification in the instance of disaster. As this body of literature has grown, we have lost more context as to why these variables are used within various applications. However, slow violence is another framework that does not necessarily focus on disasters traditionally but provides the social and political context to understand why certain individuals may…

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NIEHS Partnerships for Environmental Public Health reinvigorates network

Community engagement experts gathered at annual meeting to share strategies and opportunities for engaging diverse teams in public health. The Partnerships for Environmental Public Health (PEPH) network meeting Feb. 20-22 brought together NIEHS-funded grantees, community leaders, and NIEHS staff for the first in-person meeting since 2020. PEPH 2024 broke down programmatic silos to create a space for its nearly 200 attendees to easily converse, learn from, and engage with those outside of…

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Disparities in sleep health and insomnia may begin at a young age

Black children were 2.6 times more likely to experience insomnia that begins in childhood and persists through young adulthood compared to white children Children and teens from racial and ethnic minority groups are disproportionately affected by persistent insomnia symptoms that begin in childhood and continue through young adulthood, according to a new study. This study is one of the first to look at how childhood insomnia symptoms evolve over the…

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Exploring the Nexus of Energy Burden, Social Capital, and Environmental Quality in Shaping Health in US Counties

The United States spends more on health care than any other OECD country, yet the nation’s health is declining. Recent research has identified multiple sources for this decline, including one’s position in social and economic structures, environmental quality, and individual and collective social capital. This paper assesses the primary hypotheses that the health effects of household energy burden, social capital and environmental quality on aggregated community health levels remain while…

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