Community collective action to respond to climate change influencing the environment-health nexus

Climate change is an ongoing, creeping environmental influencer producing a wide variety of multi-scalar effects across communities. Climate change drives ecosystem changes intersecting deep-rooted, chronic vulnerabilities, including to hazards related to heat stress, infectious disease, and food systems. In diverse settings across the globe, and often as a result of inadequate action by formal institutions like governments and businesses, grassroots organizations are taking initiatives to conduct environmental monitoring and to engage in climate change-related actions. Being non-profit, often informal, and with limited resources, these organizations face classic collective action problems of incentivizing members to contribute outside of wider systems, such as markets and governments, with the clout to punish or reward actions.
We propose to study how volunteer-based, local groups self-organize to respond to climate change and its environmental impacts in order to contribute to health systems, formal and informal, which can adequately address changes to heat stress, infectious disease, and food systems. Building on prior research from the partners, we will sample citizen science and non-profit groups based in the US (Alaska) and Trinidad and Tobago (Caribbean) in order to provide a contrast of locations with similar concerns about climate change. Working with these groups, we will study not only successful organizations that have grown and acted over several years, but also sample recently formed and unsuccessful groups. Groups at these varying stages of their life cycles will provide comparative controls, and avoid biasing the data, as would occur if we studied only groups that were long lived.
The method will use a combination of semi-structured qualitative interviews, focus groups, and participatory development exercises. The latter will draw on participatory rural appraisal, factoring in the critiques of it, using processes such as resource maps, dream maps, change maps, pair-wise ranking of issues, and community walk-throughs. The findings will include recommendations as to the features that contribute to the survival and effectiveness of grassroots groups supporting their own health and health systems. Recommendations will be provided for funding strategies for governmental (or quasi-governmental) and private sector institutions that may seek to fund grassroots groups.

Scientists, policymakers, and local communities will all benefit from our work, particularly those working in the area of climate change and health.

First, despite the importance of both the social and technical dimensions of climate change health, there is limited research on the social dynamics of how communities organize to mitigate climate change risk. A major technical contribution of this project is the development of a technique for assessing the social life of community organization for climate change health risks. Indeed, the recently growing plethora of climate change specific health frameworks, measures and toolkits delineate the various factors that can contribute to community health but do not highlight and link the main topic of this study, namely how to overcome collective action problems. We will identify a set of indicators and techniques for assessing the potential to overcome collective action problems, encapsulated in our guidebook, which will provide community members, policymakers, and researchers with assessment tools that they can use to advance climate change related research.

Second, the empirical results of our study will also provide broader insight into how communities may overcome other collective action problems in other contexts. Climate change and health is not an area that has been examined in the community collective action literature; most research instead tends to focus on the broader overall management of natural resources, not the specific dynamics of health risk management. Our cases will thus provide additional knowledge on organizing collectively that researchers in these fields can utilize.

Third, the project will provide additional knowledge on how to better link the too-often siloed topics covered by this application, specifically climate change, health, and risk management-especially as applied to heat stress, infectious disease, and food systems. These findings will therefore be relevant to researchers studying all these areas, particularly when researchers work to understand the social dynamics associated with cascading hazards and disasters. The social elements of hazard cascades is still an area that is poorly understood, and two of the project members (Kelman and Clark-Ginsberg) have published in this area. We thus expect this to be a major contribution to the study.
These three advances have the potential for significant technical impact through further research and pushes the science and study of climate change and health in new and innovative directions. The new knowledge generated by applying this approach through the empirical component of the research will provide new insight into the functioning of health and links to climate change.

The management of health related impacts associated with climate change, including by engaging with local community groups, is an issue of critical importance policymaking importance. For example, the IPCC has been slowly moving towards mechanisms to incorporate local knowledge into the assessment reports, even if not peer reviewed, while numerous National Adaptation Programmes of Action and Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions highlight the importance of local, traditional, and vernacular knowledge. More demonstrations and examples of bringing local knowledge into these processes, such as through this project, would be welcome in such venues.

Policymakers and community groups working to manage the impacts of climate change will also benefit from this project. By identifying the barriers and opportunities for overcoming collective action, policymakers can use this knowledge to develop policies that support or facilitate community groups seeking to combat the effects of a changing climate. Similarly, community groups can use the results to identify potential collective action challenges and devise strategies for overcoming those challenges.