Climate Ready Philly
“The Climate-Ready Home: Teaching Climate Change in the Context of Asthma Management” was just published in the journal Environmental Justice. It details the work of a broad coalition of public health focused organizations in Philadelphia and was collectively authored by project partners. Please read about the team’s evolving approach to resident-driven climate change education over the last 6 years.
Since 2014, Clean Air Council has been working with Drexel University and National Nurse-Led Care Consortium to provide accessible climate change education in many diverse Philadelphia neighborhoods.
As the project grew the coalition expanded to include Energy Coordinating Agency, Liberty Lutheran and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. The group has facilitated 18 community climate change workshops in nine Philadelphia planning districts with well over 400 resident participants. Project partners thank the Franklin Institute and the Climate and Urban Systems Partnership for funding and supporting this project. Clean Air Council specifically thanks all partners for their amazing work on this unique effort including the community groups and organizations that hosted workshops and provided opportunities for outreach.
Clean Air Council was proud to be the lead organization focused on community outreach before workshops. At different workshops Clean Air Council presented on stormwater management and reporting environmental hazards to the appropriate city agency. Clean Air Council also used the Franklin Institute’s climate education kits to illustrate how the built environment affects extreme heat and precipitation.
In Philadelphia nearly 1 in 4 children have asthma, more than double the national average. Project partners came together to address this public health crisis and talk to Philadelphia residents about their experiences regarding climate change. All workshops centered around climate change while each year had a different focus. We started with air quality and discussed communicating about climate change and progressed to focusing on topics like extreme heat, mold, and flooding and finally turned our focus back to maintaining your home in the era of extreme weather.
In the Summer of 2017 the project took an innovative step by holding workshops in designated city “cooling centers”, working with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health to raise awareness about ways to relieve extreme heat. Click to read an article about that new (at the time) approach. Clean Air Council continues to advocate for safe spaces for city residents to beat the heat, click here for a recent article addressing the closure of air conditioned public spaces because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Clean Air Council also published an opinion piece this summer further illustrating the need for comprehensive city policy that addresses the causes and effects of climate change while acknowledging the current pandemic and the city’s widespread poverty crisis.
