scholarly journals Evidence synthesis - Evaluating risk communication during extreme weather and climate change: a scoping review

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaina MacIntyre ◽  
Sanjay Khanna ◽  
Anthea Darychuk ◽  
Ray Copes ◽  
Brian Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Risk Communication ◽  
Scoping Review ◽  
Evidence Synthesis ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Health Practitioners ◽  
Weather And Climate ◽  
Public Health Practitioners

Introduction Communicating risk to the public continues to be a challenge for public health practitioners working in the area of climate change. We conducted a scoping literature review on the evaluation of risk communication for extreme weather and climate change to inform local public health messaging, consistent with requirements under the Ontario Public Health Standards (OPHS), which were updated in 2018 to include effective communication regarding climate change and extreme weather. Methods Search strategies were developed by library information specialists and used to retrieve peer-reviewed academic and grey literature from bibliographic databases (Medline, Embase, Scopus and CINAHL) and Google country specific searches, respectively. The search strategy was validated through a workshop with experts and community stakeholders, with expertise in environment, health, emergency management and risk communication. Results A total of 43 articles were included. These articles addressed issues such as: climate change (n = 22), flooding (n = 12), hurricane events (n = 5), extreme heat (n = 2), and wild fires (n = 2). Studies were predominantly from the US (n = 14), Europe (n = 6) and Canada (n = 5). Conclusion To meet the OPHS 2018, public health practitioners need to engage in effective risk communication to motivate local actions that mitigate the effects of extreme weather and climate change. Based on the scoping review, risk communication efforts during short-term extreme weather events appear to be more effective than efforts to communicate risk around climate change. This distinction could highlight a unique opportunity for public health to adapt strategies commonly used for extreme weather to climate change.

Revisiting the Importance of Risk Communication for Public Health Practitioners

2021 ◽  
Vol Publish Ahead of Print ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul L. Knechtges ◽  
Gregory D. Kearney ◽  
Stephanie L. Richards
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Risk Communication ◽  
Health Practitioners ◽  
Public Health Practitioners

scholarly journals Assessing Knowledge and Application of Emergency Risk Communication Principles Among Public Health Workers in China

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Cope ◽  
Melinda Frost ◽  
Li Richun ◽  
Ruiqian Xie
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Risk Communication ◽  
Health Workers ◽  
International Health ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Local Public Health ◽  
Public Health Agencies ◽  
Health Agencies ◽  
Health Practitioners ◽  
Public Health Practitioners

AbstractObjectiveSince 2003, the Chinese National Health and Family Planning Commission (formerly the Ministry of Health) has implemented changes to more effectively communicate risk during public health emergencies. In spite of ongoing improvements, provincial and sub-provincial leaders face barriers, such as established modes of operation, lack of training, shortage of trained risk communicators, and limited understanding and willingness of recipients to mitigate risks.MethodsWe assessed the current status of and barriers to risk communication knowledge and practice among public health practitioners in China. We designed the survey questionnaire to capture information related to the risk communication core capacities required by international health regulations and common risk communication principles.ResultsOur findings showed that risk communication training has successfully developed an awareness of risk communication principles and the ability to implement those principles in practice in China.ConclusionsFuture efforts should focus on areas such as a dedicated risk communication workforce, requirements that public health agencies develop a risk communication plan, and additional training for public health practitioners and their partners. It is critical that the infectious diseases prevention and control law be amended to grant provincial and local public health agencies more autonomy to release information. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2014;0:1-7)

scholarly journals An interactive analysis of users, use and usability of phenological information

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raul Zurita-Milla ◽  
Iñaki Garcia de Cortazar-Atauri ◽  
Emma Izquierdo-Verdiguier
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Citizen Science ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Presentation Software ◽  
Interactive Analysis ◽  
Health Practitioners ◽  
Public Health Practitioners

<p>Phenology is the science that studies the timing of periodic plant and animal life cycle events, as well as their causes, interrelations, and variations in space and time. Phenological information has a plethora of use and hence of users. For example, this information is often used to study climate change because phenological timings respond to changes in environmental conditions. Besides this, phenological information helps to model the water, carbon and energy cycles, is necessary to monitor and manage natural and artificial man-made ecosystems and even supports nature lovers and public health practitioners. The well-established EGU session on “Phenology and seasonality in climate change” shows the diversity of phenological research and products and brings together multiple research communities: ecologists, agronomists, foresters, climatologists, geo-information and remote sensing scientists, and of course, citizen science experts. We believe that this diversity deserves attention and propose carrying out a first analysis of users, use and usability of phenological products by interacting with the participants of this EGU session. For this we will use a presentation software that allows posing questions to the audience and collecting their views in real-time. This presentation will then provide a better view of the phenological community, including their most commonly used data sources, tools, and needs. Special attention will be paid to identify major achievements and research and/or operational gaps that can help to define a phenological agenda for this new decade.</p>

scholarly journals ClimateNet: an expert-labeled open dataset and deep learning architecture for enabling high-precision analyses of extreme weather

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-124
Author(s):  
◽  
Karthik Kashinath ◽  
Mayur Mudigonda ◽  
Sol Kim ◽  
Lukas Kapp-Schwoerer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Climate Change Scenarios ◽  
Model Output ◽  
Weather And Climate ◽  
Climate Model Output

Abstract. Identifying, detecting, and localizing extreme weather events is a crucial first step in understanding how they may vary under different climate change scenarios. Pattern recognition tasks such as classification, object detection, and segmentation (i.e., pixel-level classification) have remained challenging problems in the weather and climate sciences. While there exist many empirical heuristics for detecting extreme events, the disparities between the output of these different methods even for a single event are large and often difficult to reconcile. Given the success of deep learning (DL) in tackling similar problems in computer vision, we advocate a DL-based approach. DL, however, works best in the context of supervised learning – when labeled datasets are readily available. Reliable labeled training data for extreme weather and climate events is scarce. We create “ClimateNet” – an open, community-sourced human-expert-labeled curated dataset that captures tropical cyclones (TCs) and atmospheric rivers (ARs) in high-resolution climate model output from a simulation of a recent historical period. We use the curated ClimateNet dataset to train a state-of-the-art DL model for pixel-level identification – i.e., segmentation – of TCs and ARs. We then apply the trained DL model to historical and climate change scenarios simulated by the Community Atmospheric Model (CAM5.1) and show that the DL model accurately segments the data into TCs, ARs, or “the background” at a pixel level. Further, we show how the segmentation results can be used to conduct spatially and temporally precise analytics by quantifying distributions of extreme precipitation conditioned on event types (TC or AR) at regional scales. The key contribution of this work is that it paves the way for DL-based automated, high-fidelity, and highly precise analytics of climate data using a curated expert-labeled dataset – ClimateNet. ClimateNet and the DL-based segmentation method provide several unique capabilities: (i) they can be used to calculate a variety of TC and AR statistics at a fine-grained level; (ii) they can be applied to different climate scenarios and different datasets without tuning as they do not rely on threshold conditions; and (iii) the proposed DL method is suitable for rapidly analyzing large amounts of climate model output. While our study has been conducted for two important extreme weather patterns (TCs and ARs) in simulation datasets, we believe that this methodology can be applied to a much broader class of patterns and applied to observational and reanalysis data products via transfer learning.

Has the climate become more variable or extreme? Progress 1992-2006

2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neville Nicholls ◽  
Lisa Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Extreme Events ◽  
Climate Extremes ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
Weather And Climate ◽  
Analyse Data ◽  
Climate Events

In 1990 and 1992 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its first assessment of climate change and its supplement, did not consider whether extreme weather events had increased in frequency and/or intensity globally, because data were too sparse to make this a worthwhile exercise. In 1995 the IPCC, in its second assessment, did examine this question, but concluded that data and analyses of changes in extreme events were ‘not comprehensive’and thus the question could not be answered with any confidence. Since then, concerted multinational efforts have been undertaken to collate, quality control, and analyse data on weather and climate extremes. A comprehensive examination of the question of whether extreme events have changed in frequency or intensity is now more feasible than it was 15 years ago. The processes that have led to this position are described, along with current understanding of possible changes in some extreme weather and climate events.

scholarly journals Health Equity, Population Health, and Climate Change Adaptation in Ontario, Canada

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris G. Buse
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Adaptive Capacity ◽  
Health Equity ◽  
Climate Change Adaptation ◽  
Health Inequity ◽  
Health Practitioners ◽  
Health Equality ◽  
Public Health Practitioners ◽  
Depth Interviews

Climate change holds the potential to exacerbate existing health inequalities, yet understanding how practitioners conceive health equity and health equality has received little attention in the scholarly literature. This contribution utilizes in-depth interviews with public health practitioners from health units across Ontario, Canada to characterize understandings of equity in relation to on-going climate change adaptation work. Perceptions of health equity and associated public health practices are described before discussing the resulting implications for how and why practitioners take up the equity agenda in relation to climate change. In doing so, this work problematizes existing public health tools and competencies and signals the emergence of new practices capable of simultaneously promoting adaptive capacity to climate change and reducing health inequity in Ontario.

Extreme Weather and Climate Change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Romm
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
Weather And Climate

Extreme weather is the earliest manifestation of climate change that most people will be exposed to. This chapter will focus on what science tells us about the remarkable spate of once-in-a-century (and rarer) extreme weather events we have observed in the last few years. It...

Human Health Impacts of Climate Change: Implications for the Practice and Law of Public Health

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (S1) ◽  
pp. 79-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Krueger ◽  
Paul Biedrzycki ◽  
Sara Pollock Hoverter
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Temperature And Precipitation ◽  
Health Practitioners ◽  
Human Health Impacts ◽  
Legal Strategies ◽  
Public Health Practitioners ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is an urgent priority. While few would argue that action to mitigate the causes of climate change should be led by public health practitioners, public health has a critical role in adaptation efforts. Adaptation seeks to lessen human vulnerability to extreme weather and to increased variability in temperature and precipitation. Climate change as an emerging health issue provides a test case for new approaches to public health: approaches that emphasize both collaboration with other government and private entities and application of innovative legal strategies.

scholarly journals Education, practical training and professional development for public health practitioners: a scoping review of the literature and insights for sustainable food system capacity-building

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 1771-1780 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Wegener ◽  
Debbie Fong ◽  
Cecilia Rocha
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Professional Development ◽  
Scoping Review ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
System Capacity ◽  
Practical Training ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Sustainable Food ◽  
Health Practitioners ◽  
Public Health Practitioners

AbstractObjectiveNoting the upstream positioning of sustainable food systems (SFS) to multiple global crises, the present review described examples of emerging and promising practices to support SFS-oriented education, practical training (PT) and continuing professional development (CPD) among trainees and public health practitioners (PHP). A secondary objective was to compile the evidence into practical considerations for educators, supervising practitioners and professional associations.DesignA scoping review of the literature published between 2007 and 2017 was conducted in May 2017 using four databases: CINAHL, MEDLINE, Scopus and HSSA, along with bibliography hand-searching and expert consultation. Articles were screened for relevance and specificity by independent raters.ResultsNineteen articles were included for analysis. Two-thirds of the articles related to dietitians and public health nutritionists. Emerging practices included curriculum-based considerations, incorporation of ‘sustainability’ within professional competencies and self-reflection related to SFS. Descriptions of SFS-related education, PT and CPD practices appeared largely in the literature from developed countries. Articles converged on the need for ecosystems, food systems and sustainability considerations within and across practice to support current and future practitioners.ConclusionsThere is growing interest in SFS but guidance to support educators and preceptors is lacking. Updates to dietary guidelines to reflect issues of sustainability are a timely prompt to examine the education, training and development needs of trainees and PHP. Practical examples of emerging practices can empower PHP to promote SFS in all areas of practice. More research is needed to address identified gaps in the literature and to improve SFS-specific education, PT and CPD.

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