C2H2 RCN GeoCAFE - An RCN to Convene, Accelerate, Foster, and Expand Geosciences Research Addressing Climate Change Impacts on Human Health (C2H2)

Climate change poses substantial risks to human health. Extreme temperatures; hurricanes; floods; droughts; wildfires; and other hazards, all projected to increase in frequency, duration, and/or severity with continued climate change, are already associated with higher risk of death and a diverse array of other adverse health outcomes such as kidney disease/failure, Valley Fever, West Nile virus, asthma, heat exhaustion and stress, etc. To accelerate the pace of medical research has been designed to allieviate, treat, and/or mitigate climate-driven health concerns, a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network, called the GeoCAFE has been initiated. This Network is designed to generate interaction and collaboration between health practitioners who worry about what goes on inside the patient and earth, atmosphere, climate, and ocean scientists who study the earth and physical environment from which mnay climate-induced causes and triggers of human health conditions originate. The Network is an ambitious five-year program of structured and synergistic convenings, webinars, in-person meetings, and other interactions between health and medical practitioners and geoscientists to bring together the fields required for a holisitic approach to solving and perhaps devising novel means of mitigating serious medical conditions tied to climate changge. The GeoCAFE builds on the foundation and existing infrastructure of the National Institutes of Health-funded CAFE Research Coordinating Center is managed as a joint effort between the Schools of Public Health at Boston University and Harvard University. The CAFE acronym stands for: Convene, Accelerate, Foster, and Expand the global climate change and health community of practice. The CAFE has a track record already of successfully convening the community of experts across diverse health fields. However, GeoCAFE was initiated because it is recognized in the medical/health community that there is a critical need to expand these conversations, planning sessings, collaborations, and joint actions to other fields, like geoscience, to ensure the fields of both climate change and health research benefit from meaningful engagement of experts in the sciences that study climate change and health/medical science. Broader impacts of the project include providing cross/transdisciplinary interactions focused on accelerating advances in climate-induced medical conditions, engagement of both geo- and health scientists, early in their career, so they can effectively communicate, understand, and collaborate on joint projects to improve human health. Climate change poses substantial risks to human health. Extreme temperatures, hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, and other hazards - all projected to increase in frequency, duration, and/or severity with continued climate change - are already associated with higher risk of death and diverse other adverse health outcomes. To accelerate the pace of research and translation in the field of climate change and health, we propose to launch a GeoCAFE RCN. With a planned duration of five years, GeoCAFE will build on the foundations and existing infrastructure of the NIH-funded CAFE Research Coordinating Center (CAFE RCC). The CAFE RCC, a joint effort between the schools of public health at Boston and Harvard University, serves to Convene, Accelerate, Foster, and Expand the global climate change and health community of practice. CAFE RCC is successfully convening the community of experts across diverse health fields, but there is a critical need to expand CAFE to ensure that the field of climate change and health research benefits from meaningful bi-directional collaboration and engagement between experts in the climate sciences and health sciences. The GeoCAFE RCN seeks to: 1) actively recruit geoscientists to the growing community of climate and health research, with a view to increasing diversity (writ large) in this community, 2) increase dialogue and mutual understanding between experts in the geosciences and health sciences, and 3) accelerate the pace of research and translation in climate and health by fostering meaningful collaboration across all disciplines necessary to advance this agenda. To achieve these goals, the RCN will host a series of virtual events, create new interdisciplinary cohorts of climate and health researchers that gather in-person twice per year, and apply to bring the International Conference on Urban Climate (ICUC) to Boston University. The RCN will be led by three top experts across the health and geosciences with further support and guidance provided by a Steering Committee of five additional distinguished geoscientists. Program participants will be drawn from a wider existing network of collaborators across the geosciences community. Success of the network will be assessed regularly and program offerings optimized accordingly. The proposed GeoCAFE RCN will build upon the substantial programming and infrastructure already available as part of the NIH-funded CAFE RCC. We expect that this innovative combination of activities will foster new engagement and collaboration across the geosciences and health science, break down silos between disciplines, and meaningfully accelerate urgently-needed research at the intersection of climate change and human health. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.