What We Do

Advance the health of humans, animals and their shared local and global ecosystems by partnering with community, practitioners and policymakers on research that promotes the development of sustainable, equitable and effective climate preparedness and resiliency.

The impact of climate change on health and health equity involves many types of interrelated climate hazards, diseases and ecosystem components (humans, animals, plants, microbes). No individual school of knowledge or approach in isolation will be sufficient to address this issue. Building community resilience to climate change will require intervention at individual, community and institutional scales and innovative teamwork by researchers spanning social and biological to political and economic disciplines.

Many of the skills, resources and ideas needed to address climate and health equity challenges in Buffalo, Western New York and globally exist at UB and the surrounding institutions and communities. Center researchers lead impact-oriented climate and health equity research programs and provide core services to UB and the broader community to enhance the efforts of others to protect human, animal and ecosystems from climate threats.

• Conduct innovative impact- and equity-oriented research on policy and program intervention strategies that help individuals, communities and institutions be resilient to climate threats to protect human, animal and ecosystem health, with a focus on justice-centered solutions for historically marginalized communities.
• Engage in communication about climate and health equity, through public outreach focused on climate and health equity science; elevating stories about emerging science information and community advocacy, events and other successes; providing resources for professional networking to identify new collaborators; and advocating for institutional policies to address climate justice and health equity.
• Build local and global capacity to address climate and health challenges, including training of emerging leaders from historically marginalized communities for careers in climate and health; providing pre-, mid- and post-grant support for researchers to develop climate and health equity research programs (e.g. feedback on ideas, pilot grant funding, professional networking); and providing technical expertise on sourcing and analyzing climate and health data.
• Mobilize and coordinate transdisciplinary collaborative research initiatives to discover, evaluate and elevate practical intervention strategies that protect human, animal and ecosystem health from climate change hazards.