Hello everybody, this is the, this is the climate change and disability webinar.
About to start up here shortly.
My name is Alex Ghenis I'm from the World Institute on Disability, we have joining us
Vance Taylor from the California Gov.'s Office of Emergency Services and Linda Helland
from the California Department of Public health.
So just going to do a quick test with Vance and Linda, can you hear me okay?
Linda: Yep, sounds good Vance: yes
Alex: Okay great, sounds like the audio is working for all of us.
All of the attendees are in listening mode right now, we have, oh gosh over 100 people
have registered, which is fantastic.
Thank you all for registering.
And right now, so far we've got 20 people that are in line.
Everybody is on mute, but feel free to raise your hand or put something into the questions
bar and then we can type out an answer or just answer that in general as we are presenting.
So, thank you again so much for joining, we will be starting this soon enough.
And I think we will start the webinar at about 5 past, if that's okay.
Well, thank you everybody for joining.
We really appreciate you coming and your interest in this topic.
My name is Alex – well, we are going to get the webinar started right now, and feel
free to share this around.
I will also be posting it up on the World Institute on Disability's YouTube page.
It will have full captioning and we will also make a transcript available.
This is part of a series of events sponsored by the California Department of Public Health's
Office of Health Equity.
My name is Alex Ghenis and I am a Policy and Research Specialist at the World Institute
on Disability.
We are a nonprofit located in Berkeley California and we work on a number of disability initiatives,
and one of the initiatives that we started in the past several years is called New Earth
Disability, and it's looking at the intersection of climate change and disability.
And we are joined today by Linda Helland from the California Department of Public Health
and Vance Taylor from the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services.
So, Linda or Vance do you want to introduce yourselves really quick?
Linda: sure, I can start.
This is Linda, I'm the team leader for the Climate Change and Health Equity program in
the Office of Health Equity at the California Department of Public health, and I'll talk
more about my program later when I present.
It's nice to be with you.
Vance: great, and I'm Vance Taylor from the Office of Access and Functional Needs
at Cal OES.
So I'll tell you more about the office and our mission and what we do.
Alex: great, well thank you.
Well shoot, I'd open things up for people to enter their names into the chat but I think
we want to get rolling with the webinar because we have limited time.
We'll have time at the very end for question and answer, feel free when that comes about
to introduce yourselves, say where you're from, and enter your questions into the chat
function or the questions section and we will be sure to get to those.
So, going to get rolling right now and thank you again for joining us in joining the webinar.
And, starting slide show.
There were no So thank you for joining, we are going to
be looking today at climate change and disability with a special focus on California.
California has, really is on the forefront of addressing climate change from a number
of angles, first of all reducing carbon emissions and undergoing smart development in a way
that minimizes our environmental footprint.
And also preparing and addressing the needs of vulnerable populations and just doing climate
resiliency efforts.
California is also unique in that we have a very diverse geography, a very dense population,
a large economy, and pretty much all of these areas are affected by climate change and a
number of different aspects of climate change.
Certainly our state has a very complex water system and we had a Mediterranean climate
that is susceptible to very dry periods of drought, and also very wet summers from El
Niño's – sorry, winters from El Niño's and things along those lines.
It's a very complex place to live and a lot going on here, and we are very happy to
talk about what's happened with the state.
There's been a lot of events this past year which Vance is going to talk about, and what
our future looks like, including for people with disabilities and climate resilience.
So, getting to it.
When it comes to climate and disability, one of the things that I like to connect is the
connection between disability activism, climate activism and the overlap within those.
So first of all, with disability activism, we always say it's for a good life.
So people with disabilities need support for health and independence.
Medical – so for example, I use a personal story.
I have a spinal cord injury and use a power wheelchair, and certainly require more healthcare
– preventative healthcare, as well as regular healthcare and responsive healthcare than
most able bodied people do.
With equipment, I use a power wheelchair, supplies, regular medical supplies and medications.
And there's a wide range and diversity of disabilities, physical disabilities, learning
disabilities, intellectual disabilities, sensory disabilities, chronic health conditions amongst
others, which will require unique and an array of supports.
And life quality resources as well for people that need personal assistance – everything
from personal care to, say for somebody with an intellectual or developmental disability,
life guidance resources.
Physically accessible housing or housing that is within say, access to public transit.
Transportation along those lines.
And also jobs and jobs that are available and accommodating to people with disabilities.
We need funding and stability, so social services that can range anywhere from health care to
employment support.
Community and family support.
And one of the things that comes along with climate change is that when there are any
sort of disruptions obviously, these can disrupt personal networks that are so vital to somebody's
survival and well-being and all of these take time to develop and well-being, either through
government policy and government funding and also a lot of activism.
And we've seen a lot of activism in the disability community over the past several
decades.
But they are vulnerable and can really be taken away in a split second or any sort of
regime change.
When climate activism comes about, climate change is a matter of global survival.
And it's a matter of survival for people with and without disabilities.
Many things are affected, everything from food production to natural disasters, public
health – one of the under addressed things but getting increasing attention is migration,
which I'll talk about later.
And some people are impacted more than others.
A large focus in a lot of reports is they just say vulnerable communities.
But this is a very diverse and wide range, and people are, and different groups are impacted
in unique ways as well.
So people with fewer resources and minorities are often marginalized and don't have the
resources to adapt.
Those in developing countries as well, as those have vulnerable institutions, and developing
countries tend to be especially vulnerable to actual climate impacts and people with
disabilities, which we will address.
So some groups are denying that climate change exist and then fighting to stop any action.
I think we've seen that and we've certainly seen rollbacks in any sort of regulation or
kind of progressive policies.
Luckily, in California here we are focusing a lot more on progressive policies, which
is this last piece – many others are pushing to cut emissions and create a green, sustainable
economy.
One of the things that, at the world Institute on disability that we want to focus on, and
certainly Vance and Linda as well, is working on how we need to adapt and prepare.
I say here "but ignoring how we need to adapt and prepare," some people are but
there is increasing awareness and there can be a great intersection between adaptation
and preparation and reducing emissions.
So really quickly, what is climate change?
This is really important for those of us and activists to understand how to frame the issue,
and also to communicate with our own groups and others about the importance of these issues.
So, a quick rundown of climate change – the sun emits heat, thermal radiation comes down
from the sun.
There are certain gases in the atmosphere that trap that heat and keep the atmosphere
warm.
Most of the atmosphere is oxygen and nitrogen and those don't actually trap heat at all,
so we have carbon dioxide and methane are some of the primary greenhouse gases, and
these are the only things keeping the earth warm.
So when we have, recently over the past century and a half or so, emitted a lot of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases, that basically thickens the blanket of greenhouse gases,
warms the atmosphere and leads to global warming.
And a warmer atmosphere does things such as transmits more heat into the ocean and dries
out soils and increases heat waves, they can lead to forest fires and other issues and
this is all kind of a very complex interactive system.
It affects nature, and ecosystems and humanity.
And really, the earth is a complex place and affecting the environment isn't some abstract
faraway thing, it really does also affect us as society and also as different groups
within.
So, you can see her on the left side, thermal radiation comes down from the sun.
With normalcy or 2, some of it stays in.
High CO2, you can see it on the right, there's a thicker of a blanket and it warms up the
atmosphere and that's what we are dealing with.
So, it is complex and fragile.
The numbers are really kind of staggering, which is that in 1870 the average temperature,
or the average amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is one of the primary
greenhouse gases was 270 parts per million.
In 2017, we are hovering at and even above, depending on the time of year 403 parts per
million.
So that is quite the increase, that's, oh gosh about a, well over a 30% increase right
there.
And the average temperature has increased read about 1°C since 1870.
There actually was a little dip after 1870 and then started going up a bit at the beginning
of the 21st century, but it has only been increasing since then.
But the flows of greenhouse gas, they really have a delicate balance and they had stayed
balanced within the past, but they've shifted.
And we actually know, through far far back in history and soil samples and earth cores
and things along those lines, that when CO2 goes up the earth warms, when he goes down
the earth gets cooler.
And the reason that we've kind of thrown this out of whack, is through industrialization,
power plants, cars and manufacturing produce CO2 and some also produce methane, which is
a powerful, more powerful greenhouse gas.
Large-scale farming, nothing will come off of decomposing waste and also cows tend to
belch and otherwise admit a bunch of methane.
Deforestation for planting crops and stuff like that removes plants, forest fires will
at the same time remove plants.
And actually that leads to feedback loops, which I'll show in a minute, is melting
ice and permafrost melting, all of the things that are kind of the Earth's natural way
of keeping things balance, they start a downward spiral that will continue to warm up the atmosphere
and continue to warm up those factors.
You can see here, things are heating up.
This is carbon dioxide over the past 400,000 years or so, so it fluctuated a little below
300 parts per million over the past while.
Each of these little dips was kind of an Ice Age, and the higher ones are called interglacial
periods, and then all of a sudden we were in an interglacial period, built our whole
society around how the earth was balanced.
But then all of a sudden we kicked all of the CO2 way way up, and what that led to is
an increase in temperature.
So here you can see is the temperature is just gone up, it's right about 1°C above
where it was before we started committing all of this carbon dioxide in the 1870s, and
that is leading to climate change impacts.
So on the left side here, we got direct impacts.
Stronger storms and more frequent storms, a lot of as happened in California and fans
will cover that.
Expanding drought and forest fires, sea level rise which can flood areas closer to the ocean,
and then if there are storms and storm surges, make coastal areas more vulnerable to those.
The ocean acidifying, and we are seeing the great.
Resend some of the reefs dying out, which will affect plant and animal life, which really
is a food source for a lot of people as well.
More intense heat waves, and that actually is also affected by the way that we build
out, say our cities, the more concrete that you have the warmer that it is, it's called
the heat island effect, and then general weather pattern changes.
And each of these then leads to indirect impacts, some of them on our build infrastructure and
then some of them on our society and greater populations.
Which is, say if you have storms that it might damage infrastructure, that is actually something
that we recently saw in California just last year, almost exactly one year ago with the
collapse of the spillway at the Oroville Dam.
Food insecurity, if you have drought, food becomes less secure, if you have oceans that
are affected people that rely on fish might be affected as well.
Poor health, say from air pollution, from heat waves, economic disruptions, one of the
people that things don't consider, say is that seaports might be flooded, and there's
a lot of international trade that happens.
Environmental and ecosystem instability, and then widespread migration and what we call
climate refugees which we touch on in a minute.
Here are some of the major consequences.
Stronger storms and extreme weather, which Long story short a warmer atmosphere holds
more water vapor, which you can imagine sort of boiling a pot of water it puts more steam
up into the atmosphere, and the create stronger storms.
Many types of those, those are geography dependent, we've seen certainly the hurricanes that
hit the Caribbean and Atlantic this year, were huge, and then we have also experienced
some very strong winter storms, pushing snow off of the Great Lakes for example in the
Northeast that can lead to a lot of storm -related injuries and fatalities.
A lot of infrastructure damage and interrupted services, Puerto Rico certainly is still recovering
its economy and health care system and then its overall electric grid.
Another effect can be drought and water shortages, and crop stress.
It is greatest in developing countries without a lot of complex water infrastructure.
California, we are lucky in that we have a very complex and well constructed series of
dams and canals and water management agencies and other entities, unfortunately we build
that around an older climate so they are having to figure out how to manage that in the future.
But if you can imagine in a developing country that doesn't have that kind of infrastructure,
that can really affect them as well and also not having kind of the farming techniques
to do that, and a lot of developing countries live in countries that are simply susceptible
to drought.
A lot of this is exacerbated by poor resource management, water or land management can be
some of those.
Large-scale migration is another one of those.
The international organization on migration has predicted that there will be anywhere
between 200 million to over 1 billion climate migrants by 2050, and that will be caused
by resource stresses, say water stresses are people leaving drought ridden areas, as we
are already starting to see in sub-Saharan Africa.
Rising sea levels, social and political tensions can all cause those.
And then talking to feedback loops, then if you have population pressures building up
on certain borders, then that can cause resource stresses, social and political tensions in
its own right, so this is a very complex system that we are dealing with.
A lot of people are saying "stop climate change" and there are a lot of international
targets that have been set.
California is extremely proactive about reducing our carbon footprint overall.
Unfortunately, climate scientists predict changes and large changes even if we cut emissions.
Unfortunately, we cannot stop global warming – I put a sad face over here, this is probably
my most cynical slide so pardon me for that.
But you can see on the left that there are a bunch of future scenarios that have been
put forward, people are hoping that we can reduce emissions which is kind of some of
those lower blue trajectories in that left-hander graph of what the future temperature changes
will be.
But if there are feedback loops or if we keep on burning fossil fuels the way we have, there's
a potential for a very large set of future climate changes.
We do need to adapt, preparing for climate change is very important safe lives.
It saves lives, well-being economies and more.
So the first step is to create general resiliency, which is physical and economic infrastructure
and social systems and support networks and actually I find this to be an incredibly motivating
opportunity for us to just build a more resilient, equal and sustainable, in terms of the socioeconomic
sense, society.
So all of a sudden if we have a more stable economy that benefits people in its own right,
and a more stable and resilient and dynamic economy can withstand climate stresses at
the same time.
And really kind of erring on the side of caution is a good way to go with that.
And a 2nd one, and we'll be talking about that, definitely Vance and Linda will later
on, is situation focused planning.
So there is disaster readiness and response for things such as storms and wildfires.
Resource management, California is trying to figure out what to do with water shortages
when it comes to providing water to people as well as water behind dams that provide
a lot of our electricity.
Migration and creating dynamic systems around that.
It's important to start early and provide people with resources, and plan ahead so we
are not caught offguard, and really practice the precautionary principle, which is it's
better to plan too much for the worst-case scenario that is to be caught in the wrong
position.
So adaptive climate justice is recognizing that oppressed and marginalized groups will
be hit the hardest and supported least in the face of climate change.
This includes developing countries in the Global South, economically disempowered import
individuals, people of color and religious and ethnic minorities, and actually people
with disabilities in the end.
There's been a lot of activism within a lot of existing marginalized and oppressed
communities, especially communities of color and organized communities that are low income,
in addressing this kind of an equal impact of climate change.
And I'll also highlight a lot of native communities and indigenous communities as
well.
And climate justice says well, when you are doing the resiliency, make sure that you address
root causes of vulnerability and inequality, prepare with specific focus on vulnerable
groups and that is in general and kind of also with those specific climate impacts I
mentioned, and also provide resources.
And what we say is, demand help from the privileged and those with resources that have that.
That can be within a geographic area and within the United States, so we can say, government
needs more resources to provide this, or international aid at the same time.
So, moving on to the main topic here, what is climate change have to do with disability?
For small, people with disabilities face vulnerability and discrimination, marginalization and a
lack of resources and social supports in general.
I think a lot of us here in the disability community simply recognize that right off
the bat.
Climate change creates additional stresses that create stress on the kind of existing
social systems that we face.
And during climate change, effects on people with disabilities may experience excessive
injury, death or health consequences, fall behind in times of emergency, be abandoned
or lose social support networks or lose social or medical supports.
At the same time, that can be in an immediate disaster in times of stress or if all of a
sudden, governmental or social resources get stressed as well.
So it kind of builds off of the medical and social model of disability and the way that
we look at climate change.
The medical model says that something is wrong with the person compared to the able-bodied
norm.
It says that people with disabilities are broken, it implies brokenness, a lack of capacity
or unworthiness within society.
Actually my colleague Marsha Saxton, who is going to join us, this is certainly her specialty
is disability and sociology but she's not feeling well today.
So she sends her regards and I want to thank her for all of her help with this project
as well.
There has been a history of exclusion and in eugenic ideology of simply casting people
with disabilities aside and putting them kind of out of sight out of mind, saying institutions.
And there's something here that's connected to climate change which is the triage mentality
which is if you have limited resources, you need to recognize who can support themselves
the easiest and who requires the most resources to support themselves.
And people will say "well, we need to take care of the people who need the fewest resources
to support, and then once we get low enough on the totem Paul, if we run out of resources
and people that need them the most, we are sorry, you're kind of on your own."
And that is something that within conventional disaster response, creates a lot of problems
for people in our community.
The social model of disability, on the other hand, says that disability is located in the
attitudes and the inaccessible environments.
It's not just a philosophy, what it really requires is a change in the way that society
provides support and addresses people with disabilities.
So there has been 60 years of activism, a lot of it happened here in Berkeley California,
where the world Institute on disability is located, through what we call the modern disability
rights movement.
And actually coming up here on January 23's Ed Roberts Day, which Ed was one of the main
founders of the modern disability rights movement and one of the founders of our organization.
And it's pushed through everything, the Americans with disabilities act, the 504 regulations,
the international agreement such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
and there is growing recognition that if we provide inclusion and resources, then people
can live on an equal playing field.
There is inclusive infrastructure that we need, accessible housing, accessible roads,
sidewalks, entrances, accessible transportation.
And then social cohesion, which is for example stable and dependable relationships.
This can be anything from personal care support networks for somebody who needs the personal
care as well as, say somebody with a psychological or developmental disability who need people
around to provide with the community that they need to live more stable lives.
And then medical, nonemergency, and durable medical equipment resources which require
kind of a modern economy and a stable economy to provide and keep people stable and healthy.
Other social needs include social benefits to pay for essential services, this may be
anything from Medicaid to In-Home Supportive Services which provides personal attendant
care.
These typically are location -dependent and that's actually something that we run into
problems, if somebody might be dislocated due to a one-time climate disaster or simply
have to be a long-term climate migrant, is if you are all of a sudden dislocated of your
county, where a lot of your social services were tied to, then that creates major difficulties.
Other social needs include mobility across borders, so that's physical mobility as
well as finding accessible places to live, as well as simply people with disabilities
have been turned away at borders because of their disability only.
Electric power and modern infrastructure in that respect.
Communications, so this can be for personal support, especially if somebody is stranded
and needs to connect with any of their personal support networks.
And then finally political empowerment and engagement and access to that, so that we
can continue to fight and maintain the social needs that fit with the social model of disability.
And the truth is that we are vulnerable, we've been identified as vulnerable in the past.
And I think that we kind of need to recognize that and own it, and say that we need to fight
for the resources to protect us in many of those situations.
So the concept was created by Katrina and other disasters.
The neglect of marginalized people, which in a lot of the climate change literature
is simply pooled together into saying vulnerable communities.
We have had good and bad news with regards to disaster response especially, and the,
say UN, oh gosh, disaster response – anyway, if you want to be with that acronym, you well
will roll on from that and feel free to Google it.
But many of these issues have been touched on at the NGO, government, local and international
levels and we are seeing a lot more recognition of them.
Now in terms of climate change, one of the things that has been touched on the most is
that climate change leads to more disability.
And a public health matter of this has been disability adjusted life years, which quantifies
the level of disability, population and time into a single metric of quality of life.
If you can imagine if they, if what they would perceive as a perfectly able-bodied person,
parishes one year early, that would be one disability adjusted life year.
If a person requires some medical impairment that is deemed to be 50% impact on their quality
of life, and they have that for 2 years, 0.5 times 2 is one disability adjusted life year.
It's kind of a funky little quantification of disability, we find it to be really problematic
from a social perspective, but it is the existing focus of major reports.
These can come from storm -related injuries, from crop shortages, malnutrition, invasive
diseases, climate -related conflict and war injuries, which is something that is getting
more attention say, for example the war in Syria came out of a large drought is something
that people are increasingly recognizing.
It will also have extra impacts on people with disabilities.
In terms of storms and extreme weather events, Vance will talk about this, is recognizing
and running into inaccessible shelters and evacuation methods.
And also the fact of fragile support systems, in terms of medical support, caregivers, if
somebody all of a sudden has to evacuate and doesn't have access to their medications
or electric power, or many of the things that are at home, that puts them in in the precarious
position.
Heat waves, is that people with disabilities often, depending on their disability or health
condition, have increased chance of heat exhaustion or heatstroke.
People with disabilities are disproportionately poor and have reduced access to air-conditioning.
Invasive diseases, if somebody has a pre-existing health condition, that they are more vulnerable
to any sort of illness.
And the mass climate migration, issues that they may encounter include and accessible
transit as a migrate as well as in accessible housing, as well as maintaining benefits,
income supports, finding jobs that work with their disability and then interpersonal support
networks.
A key example here is natural disasters.
On the top left some of the fires that hit California recently, on the top right the
Oroville Dam disaster that Vance will talk about.
Hurricane Katrina was one that really brought this to the forefront as well, you can see
the hurricane on the bottom left and a lot of people with disabilities in the Superdome
on the bottom right.
Disaster readiness and response.
We do need communication for sensory disabilities.
So storm warnings on TV should have closed captioning for example.
Announcements in shelters should be done either using any sort of captioning, interpreters,
or other source of communications that are accessible to all.
Evacuation will include accessible buses and operational paratransit.
Mass evacuations from nursing homes ahead of time, that's an issue that people encountered
over in Florida during one of the recent hurricanes this year.
Shelter, so identifying shelters that are fully accessible with medical supports, being
careful of the difference between having integrated shelters and really the benefit of those having
integrated shelters with disability related supports, as opposed to separate special needs
shelters for people with disabilities and people with say more complex medical situations.
And finally recovery, recovery finding housing for people who are probably in an already
difficult socioeconomic, and employment, rediscovering employment.
Another one is migration.
You're on the top left is a graph of how many people and are vulnerable to the projected
high tide line across the United States, depending on sea level rise.
And it can be, you know close to 10 million people might simply be out of the home, so
that's going to need a response and people are going to have to move.
Climate migrants are people who are forced to relocate due to climate -related factors,
as I mentioned earlier up to 1 billion migrants by 2050.
Many reasons for relocating, like coastlines, evacuating storms and not returning home,
something that we've seen here in California certainly.
Damaged economies and simply not having to resources or personal economic support and
seeking better lives elsewhere.
And then refugees from climate -related conflict, which really kind of creates a fuzzy line
and that is connected to one the last bullet points that I'll touch.
The first one is that, when it comes to relocation, there are difficulties for people with disabilities
in displacement and relocation.
Identifying and attaining accessible transit and accessible housing for maintaining and
rebuilding support networks, attaining or transferring healthcare and social services.
In this can be simply enrolling in and getting the funding for them say that somebody requires
a set of personal care attendants, also hiring and enrolling new individual support networks.
Refusal of entry due to disability, which is something that has been seen especially
within, say merit-based immigration system.
Excessive vulnerability throughout migration, and this can lead to assault, sexual, anything
along those lines.
Abandonment by family, community or caregivers.
Some of this is not going to be applicable here in California, or even within the general
borders of the United States for people that are currently living in the US.
Or citizens, say that aren't vulnerable to deportation if they are somehow encountering
authorities during some sort of climate crisis or migration.
So, but there still are international issues that we need to be aware of.
Most climate migration literature doesn't include disability, and disability and displacement
literature is almost entirely about conflict refugees.
And as I mentioned earlier, climate change sometimes can create conflict, which then
leads to conflict refugees.
So we do have kind of a, some gray areas there as well.
There are economic intersections here.
Which is that climate change effects economies and markets through decreased productivity.
Certain supply lines might be affected, if there are storms that wash away highways for
example, or through coastal ports that are flooded.
There can be resource shortages and price increases, this includes for food supplies.
And people with disabilities already face economic challenges.
Here are a few pieces of data from the 2015 American Community Survey, which is that people
ages 21 to 64 in the USA.
Rates of employment for people with disabilities was 35.2% vs. 78.3% without.
Annual earnings were $40,000 vs. $45,000, and the poverty rate was more than double,
it was 27% vs. 11.6%.
And finally there are unique economic needs which includes medical care and supplies and
government benefits, supports and public services that I touched on earlier.
So have we been considered?
A lot of organizations look at climate change with regular reports, this includes the International
Panel on Climate change, national and local government permissions, California has a whole
set of very focused climate change research and resiliency articles as well.
There are nonprofits, plenty of nonprofits that do research and education about climate
change, I'm sure a lot of us have interacted with them.
People with disabilities are often not specifically addressed, instead we are lumped in with quote
vulnerable or quote special groups.
What a lot of documents will say it, certain populations, vulnerable populations such as
women children and the elderly and the disabled will experience this climate change.
There are, I looked at the International Panel on Climate Change report and there was just
a couple of mentions of disability, and it was simply in those sorts of sentences.
There has been some mention, as I mentioned about causing disability or more disability
adjusted life years.
There have been a few articles, white papers and a 5 day quote e-discussion about climate
change and.
I'm finding more and more people are interested in it and incorporating disability into reports
as well.
Really, we started this project about 4 years ago and it's been phenomenal progress, I
want to thank everybody that's helped to raise awareness about this.
So there are growing efforts.
Especially around inclusive disaster readiness and response.
There's agencies, local agencies, there's state-level guidance that certainly calls
on including vulnerable communities and people with disabilities.
There's NGOs, some are internationally focused, some are focused a bit more domestically.
Portlight strategies is one that has been fantastic, especially in Houston and Puerto
Rico this past year with the hurricanes.
And then local advocates really pushing for their well-being.
There's an increasing interest in the climate and disability connection.
These are actors at all levels, I find that every time that raise this topic the kind
of ears perk up, and people say "oh, that's interesting," and want to start expanding
the conversation as well.
And I certainly want to thank you for joining and being a part of this conversation.
We do, however need to connect and organize and think we will talk about that at near
the end in terms of what are our next steps.
So some interested organizations include the department of public health and office of
emergency services, county emergency managers.
The Union of concerned scientists, we published an article on climate migration with the International
Organization on Migration as well.
These are both interested organizations.
And then disability organizations, Portlight, we have a partner in Australia, ourselves
and a few others.
So really, now before I handed out to Vance, I'm going to talk about climate change in
California.
Because this is a California focused webinar and it's important to understand what our
state is going to go through in the future.
Some of this information is California's 3rd climate assessment.
You can see the link at the bottom there, climatechange.ca.gov/research, or simply climatechange.ca.gov
includes a lot of information.
In this image at the top is an image of the CR snowpack before one of our major droughts
that started it 2011 and went all the way through 2015 2016.
And you can see March 27 vs. March 29, the amount of snow, which we rely on for a lot
of our water needs, was really down, and in the whole southern half of the state is just
right.
So these are the effects that we've seen.
So a quick overview of temperature and heat.
By 2050, California is projected to warm by approximately 2.7 degrees Farhrenheit above
2000 averages.
And one of the things that California and the reports have pointed out is that, this
is really whether or not we focus on strong emissions reductions, because some warming
is sort of built into the system based off of what we've already put forward.
Depending on what we do in the future, they could increase by 4.1 to 8.6 degrees Fahrenheit
depending on emissions levels.
This will lead to some large level issues such as more springtime warming which influences
our snowmelt and how that affects our water availability, and also our hydroelectric power.
Summer temperatures will rise more than winter temperatures, which will be greater in inland
California compared to the coast, which are areas that struggle with heat waves and also
have high rates of disability populations.
And the heat waves, when they come will be more frequent, hotter and longer will be fewer
extremely cold nights, which that will affect agriculture as well as, during the waves,
people's ability to kind of cool off at night.
We will have decreased precipitation in general during kind of longer periods of drought.
Which you can see on the top left, that's a drought monitor for us in 2016, when we
were really dead in the center of one of our major droughts, and that's from March, at
the end of the winter semi, semi rainy season.
Which leads to forest fires on the bottom left and on the bottom right those are some
the fires that hit Northern California this past year in Napa County.
But at the same time, when storms do it, on the top right there we've got our atmospheric
River, very heavy winter storms, rainfall is going to come to in kind of stronger, heavier
bursts, and it's going to come down more as rain and less as snow.
So kind of some bullet points about that: less precipitation, especially in Southern
California, on average.
More precipitation falling as rain, not snow, which kind of the Sierra snowpack serves as
a second water reservoir for us that slowly melts over the spring and fills our reservoirs
for use for drinking water and agriculture.
We will have the stronger atmospheric River events.
In general, we will have drier soils, dried and dying vegetation, which increases fire
risk as well as increases the risk of mudslides because there simply lesser it's holding
soils together when heavier rain event hits.
And you can see kind of that by 2085, the increases in numbers of large fires ranging
from 58% to 128% above historical levels.
And the amount of the area burned will increase by 57% to 169%, depending on the location.
These are huge numbers that we are going to see in California.
We are going to have reductions in hydroelectric power because a lot of our power comes from
both small and large dams that are located in the very mountainous Sierra Nevada.
At the same time, we are going to have more electricity demand from air-conditioners from
people that are trying to withstand kind of summer heat, running their air-conditioners
more, and then more people purchasing air-conditioners because they simply cannot deal with heat
waves without them.
So the areas that predominantly nonminority and wealthier ZIP Codes are projected to experience
smaller increases in energy consumption, while those with more Latino and lower income residents
are projected to experience larger increases in energy use.
So that's something to consider for our community.
At the same time, on extremely hot days transmission lines lose power and we do have fire risks
to large transmission lines, including transmission lines running from Oregon to California when
we really really need a lot of energy, and in the LA area which is something that we
ran into during the Southern California forest fires this year.
Sea level rise.
Here is the beautiful, beautiful San Francisco Bay, and you can see Berkeley but I think
if I peek hard enough I can see my brother's apartment in San Francisco.
California, coastal counties in California are home to about 32 million people.
We have 3 of the largest ports on the West Coast in Long Beach, sorry Long Beach, Los
Angeles and Oakland, as well as a major military base in San Diego and a major oil refinery
up here in Richmond and then some in Southern California.
San Francisco is right there on the bay and creates a lot of kind of economic activity.
And then even our Central Valley is at or below sea level kind of being protected by
a series of levees, and then the Central Valley is sinking a little bit.
Any sort of sealevel rise is really dangerous to our economy and the people in it.
And the sea level has risen 7 inches in the last century.
Sea level along states coastline in 2050 could be 10 to 18 inches higher than in 2000, and
31 to 55 inches higher by 2100, depending on emissions scenarios and some climate modeling.
And actually some recent research that I've seen that was published this most recent climate
assessment is saying that, just people looking at Antarctica, we are probably going to see
more than most previous estimates showed.
Increasing strength of storms, storms kind of push water ahead of them just given the
air pressure and a push water up on shore and caused storm surges and higher waves.
Vance, we were talking about this about the strength of the storm that hit Southern California
that caused the mudslides really recently, and what they say is that first of all in
terms of storm surge and then in terms of rainfall, as early as 2050 given projections
of sealevel rise, today's 100 year storm, the effect on how high up on the coast it
affects could occur once every year.
And when they say hundred year storm, it's not that necessarily happens every hundred
years, it's that has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.
There are some sponsors that areas are looking at.
In the California Bay here, they are looking at reinforcing both, kind of man-made and
natural ecosystem levees and say helping marshes to regenerate, which can protect against storm
surges.
The state, counties and other areas are really looking at responses to this, so it's not
all doom and gloom, but something to be aware of.
Health and but after this I'm going to hand it right off the Vance, and this is a quote
that I should've handed off to Linda, because she's from the Department of Public Health,
but as you can see.
On the top left there is Shasta Dam with low water levels, and low water levels and even
water pollution can affect public health.
Some invasive diseases through mosquitoes or even invasive diseases affecting safe for
us, a pine beetle as something that we've seen, or affecting ops.
And then air quality both higher temperatures lead to higher ozone levels, and then forest
fires affect air quality and there's that of quintessential photo of the LA basin with
a lot of smog with it.
So this quote in the report before I handed off to Vance: "Public health could also
be affected by climate change impacts on air quality, food production, the amount and quality
of water supplies, energy pricing and availability, and the spread of infectious diseases.
These impacts could have potentially long-term repercussions, and the severity of their impacts
depends largely on how communities and families can adapt.
And that's the point to take home is we need to adapt smartly and well.
And Vance, well I guess we'll hand it off to you and I'll keep running the slideshow
for now.
Vance: okay thanks Alex, appreciate it.
Thank you Alex and Marsha for inviting me to have participate in the webinar.
I certainly appreciate what you guys do and everything that has been known to coordinate
the so thank you.
We are going to kick into the next slide, I'll just say 2017 has been kind of a wild
year and here we are in 2018, they say time flies.
I actually moved back to California.
Let's go back one more Alex, thanks.
I actually moved back to California in 2015 after having lived on the East Coast for about
13 years and in the 13 years I was gone, quite a bit changed for me.
I got married, had 2 kids, we accumulated a lot of things, which meant that after the
move, on the way back to California, there were a lot of boxes to unpack.
It was interesting because as fate would have it, I got sworn in on August 3 I believe of
2015, as the Chief of Office of Access and Functional Needs.
Our mission and our role is to identify the needs of anybody with access or functional
needs or disability before, during and after a disaster, and integrate those needs into
everything we do as it relates to disaster management or emergency management and planning.
And so I got sworn in and an hour later, I got activated, and so that meant that right
out of the gate, I was working some pretty late hours.
And it was kind of funny because, especially my first few days I would come home and there
were boxes just everywhere.
And so, I'd use my amazing wheelchair driving skills to navigate my way through the house
without running anything or anyone over, and then interestingly I started to notice that
every time I came home, there was more and more room to drive around.
And it was as if magically, while I was off at work, activated in response to what was
a fire, the box fairy would come to my house and unpack things.
And one day I came home and there were no more boxes to drive around, everything was
just unpacked in its proper place, my house was totally set up.
Now, in case you are wondering, it turns out there is no such thing as a box fairy, it
turns out it was my wife who is doing the unpacking.
And every day, she would tackle a room and whatever she didn't get to by the time I
got home, she would tackle the following day.
Now I can't help but think that, somehow that process of getting unpacked and getting
moved in is a metaphor for what we are all trying to do.
And as much as we would like to see access and functional needs into everything we do
in California, as much as we would like to see climate adaptation strategies integrated
into everything we do in California, the reality is this isn't something that happens overnight.
It is a process.
It's a difficult, seemingly impossible at times, definitely slower than what we want
it to be, process.
And yet we keep at it.
Each of us has a responsibility as individuals as well as on behalf of the agencies, organizations
and stakeholders we represent, to think about how we integrate access and functional needs
into climate adaptation strategies, and to do more than what has been done before.
Now thankfully we actually have the influence and the wherewithal to do it, but we do need
to ask ourselves, what can I do to advance this mission of inclusion?
And we need to find the fortitude to do it, to work towards it, box by box day by day,
until we find things as they should be.
Now let's take a look at where we are and where we been so we can better determine where
it is we need to go.
Alex can you hit the next slide?
Now this is just simple.
2017 absolutely one for the record books.
Now let's go to the next slide.
I mean, do you like rain?
We had water to the tune of 45 atmospheric rivers by March.
Of those, a third were categorized as strong or extreme, which is why by April, the amount
of rainfall we had received was 197% above our yearly average.
Do you like floods?
2017 saw deadly floods across the state has rivers rose well above the flood stages, inundating
houses, schools and communities.
This of course led to the evacuation of thousands of Californians from their homes, not to mention
road closures, blocked routes to agricultural land and millions upon millions of dollars
in crop damages.
And in the millions of customers who lost power in northern California and Southern
California during these events, ask if you take all of that in combination, it makes
for a pretty interesting work week.
Mudslides.
If you like mudslides, we had those too.
In fact, the Big Sur landslide on highway one – and let me say how crazy this is.
So I'm putting this slide deck together, right, and I'm putting out info here on
the Big Sur landslide that it was the largest in California state history, resulted in $1
billion in highway damage.
There's parts of the highway under a 40 foot layer of dirt and rock.
And if you check out on the photo here, that massive mud dome, that actually created a
wide skirt over the road and down the cliff and onto the shore.
And what's wild is as I'm writing this, of course what happens in Southern California,
we get major mudslides.
But that's 2018 and this is a 2017 review so I won't spend too much time about that.
I will simply say every time we seem to have a record-breaking event, it is not too far
down the road that that record seems to be broken.
Let's go the next slide.
Alright so who can forget about the Oroville.
Right, where we all learned what an emergency spillway is.
Turns out the Oroville Dam, which was the nation's tallest dam, has this thing called
an emergency spillway.
A lot of storms dumped a historic amount of rain, Lake Oroville which is the largest man-made
lake in the country, rose until it flowed over a concrete weir at the top of the dam's
emergency spillway.
That was okay until the erosion came into play, threatening to cause an immediate failure
that would have resulted in the collapse of the concrete weir, sending a 30 foot wall
of water through the downstream communities.
And so it was that the largest non-hurricane evacuation in US history came to be.
We moved nearly 200,000 people, virtually overnight, brought in every resource that
you can imagine from every corner of the nation and worked to support the needs of 42 shelters.
All are striving to ensure that the needs of people with disabilities, people with access
and functional needs, were identified and addressed throughout each phase of response
and recovery.
And then we spent the next several months working with the emergency management process
at Cal OES headquarters and at the joint field office and our area field office with FEMA
within each of our regions, and in partnership with each locality, we continue to be bombarded
with incidents up and down the state.
As we did so, we pushed our way through the hottest summer in California history and a
fall heatwave that shattered all-time high records in the Bay Area, which of course turned
to the Golden State Brown and extremely dry which paved the way for disaster.
Alex can go the next slide.
On October 8, firefighters began battling multiple wildfires in numerous counties across
Northern California, prompting massive evacuations and causing devastating consequences as strong
winds fueled fast-moving fires.
By the time the flames had been extinguished, and the plumes of smoke had cleared, more
than 11,000 firefighters and nearly 500 law enforcement personnel had worked the disaster.
California Governor's Office of Emergency Services set up a shelter task force, which
I participated in.
We coordinated more than 40 shelter operations, oversaw the distribution of 40,000 meals,
60,000 liters of water, 2000 ADA compliant cots, 12,000 blankets and sheets all got distributed.
More than 245,000 acres and 8900 structures had burned.
More than $9 billion of losses had been recorded and 43 people have perished.
Indeed, by virtually every metric we have, this was the worst disaster in state history.
So, you can imagine what it felt like from an emergency management perspective when,
about a month and a half later, on December 4, the Thomas Fire erupted in Southern California
and we collectively sprang into action to battle that blaze.
Next slide.
We brought in strike teams, C-130s and fire engines from Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New
Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, the US military and National Guard.
Virtually every local fire department in the state was brought in to assist with the Thomas
fire.
And even with all that, it still burned over 283,000 acres, becoming the largest wildfire
in California history.
It destroyed over thousand structures and damaged hundreds more, forced over 104,000
people to evacuate, cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fight the fires.
8,500 firefighters which is the largest mobilization of firefighters for combating any wildfire
in California history.
That's how many it took to knock it down.
So, that in a very very very tiny nutshell 2017.
I finished the year one locus short of winning disaster management bingo.
So you got to believe that I was in the ball drop on New Year's Eve to welcome 2018.
Now I've got to say, in all fairness I didn't know that I would only make it 8 days into
2018 before being activated for the mudslides.
Alright, so we saw all this destruction, we were activated for over 150 days from our
state operations center.
What did we learn and how do we got to go forward?
Let's go to the next slide.
In activating for each disaster, I've had the unique opportunity to compare and contrast
how effective jurisdictions responded to the access and functional needs of individuals
within their communities.
And in doing so I've found that there are 3 things that local emergency managers can
do, regardless of the size, economic standings or geographic location of the jurisdiction,
that exponentially increase their capacity and capability to save lives, to reduce suffering,
increase independence, and promote the health of individuals with access and functional
needs.
The first thing is, we see that jurisdictions are successful when they've established
a relationship with their local Independent Living Center.
We see success when jurisdictions reassess the accessibility of their sheltering facilities.
We see success when jurisdictions integrate ASL interpreters within their press conferences.
And in an environment of thinning budgets and ever limited bandwidth, these are the
things that local emergency managers can do without spending exorbitant amounts of time
or money, that will yield monumentally significant results in their efforts to integrate access
and functional needs.
These things are tried, they are true, and they are tested.
I want to take a few moments to spend time on each item.
Alex, can you go to the next slide.
Number one, establish a relationship with your local independent living center.
Alright, many of us on this webinar now, some of us felt, independent living centers are
not places where places with disabilities go to live.
You might be surprised how often I get that.
ILCs are community-based nonprofits, organizations designed by individuals with disabilities.
The ultimate goal of an ILCs is to promote the independent living of individuals with
disabilities.
There are 28 in California and every community emergency manager needs to connect with their
independent living center.
As emergency managers, we struggle sometimes, right, to ensure that we are addressing access
and functional needs.
We explore and debate things like, hey should we have registries?
And we hear towns and cities, counties debate that all the time.
Do we have a registry, do we not have a registry, what's the best way to inform people about
disasters and evacuation requirements, how do we make sure that we are sheltering properly
to provide access for people with disabilities?
And these jurisdictions oftentimes go through this massive effort and struggle and ask all
these questions without ever realizing that the quickest, most efficient way to address
those challenges is partner with a local independent living center.
If you want to ensure that people with disabilities are receiving lifesaving emergency related
information, partner with your ILC.
They will push that information to consumers.
If you want to receive that info, tie in with your local ILC.
If you want to know the needs of evacuating, partner with the ILC, they will tell you which
consumers contacted them and what their transportation needs are.
I always tell emergency managers, if you want to know about unmet needs in shelters, partner
with the ILC.
They cannot only help assess shelters, but they can determine the resources that consumers
will need there.
Often times, ILCs will even be able to provide durable equipment and assistive technology
for consumers in sheltering environments.
Amazingly, access to all of that costs emergency managers exactly 0 dollars.
So it's not a bad deal.
Conversely, there's a real benefit to ILCs in that they can, in partnership with managers,
increase the independence of consumers they serve before, during and after disasters.
Next Slide.
Okay, reassess the accessibility of shelter and facilities.
Now I can go to just about any county in the state right now and show them all the facilities
in their jurisdiction that are designated as potential shelters within the national
sheltering system, NSS, and I'll guarantee that they'd be surprised.
I've had counties look through NSS and report that some of the facilities are actually condemned
buildings.
Like, what is that doing in there?
I don't know.
Further, the facilities that are actually not condemned buildings, very few of them
have been assessed for accessibility.
And even though policies dictate that they are supposed to be assessed, most of the assessments
that happen are either incomplete or out of date.
And too often, officials are selecting shelters based on poor or incomplete information.
They decide they are going to shelter at the veteran's center because that's where
they went last time.
Nevermind that the veteran center doesn't have much to offer in terms of accessible
resources.
So let me just give you a quick example.
Going to a shelter in Northern California, this is during the Oroville disaster, and
it was at an elementary.
And I arrived at the shelter to find that people were practically sleeping on top of
each other.
It was overcrowded, there was a shortage of accessible bathrooms.
There were no accessible showers, and the campus itself was difficult to navigate by
wheelchair.
And I went to another shelter, in the same town.
This one was at a high school.
Probably the nicest high school I had ever seen, I remember wishing I had gone to that
high school.
There were tons of accessible bathrooms, it had 22 wheelchair accessible showers, 2 gymnasiums
and was easy to navigate.
Amazing, right?
Now, what was the distance between the elementary school and high school?
3 blocks.
Okay, so why then, with the high school being right there, did they ever even open the elementary
school as a shelter?
Now it turns out that's where they had always gone.
They had decided where to shelter based on historical experience instead of using current
assessment data to make a more fully informed decision.
So I told communities, if you want to be successful in your sheltering, you need to reassess the
facilities you have listed in NSS.
Next slide.
Integrating ASL interpreters within press conferences.
I'll just tell you what happened during the October wildfires in Northern California.
Trouble started when local law officials opted not to notify the public about massive wildfires
via wireless emergency alert or the emergency alert system.
That singular decision left thousands of deaf people unaware of the imminent danger they
were in and instead of being woken up by their vibrating cell phones, which many strategically
placed beneath their pillows like they do every night, their phones laid still.
So it was, with the fires raging all around, members of the deaf community slept, uninformed
of the danger around them.
In the face of this immense challenge, staff from our deaf and hard of hearing partner
agencies, who had found out about the wildfires through friends, sprang into action, started
sending text messages to alert their clients about the danger.
They even drove into burn areas to wake people up and assist them in evacuation.
Upon getting to their cars, the sudden realization came.
With flames in seemingly every direction, they did not know where to go for safety.
And so, like their non-deaf counterparts, they pulled to the side of the road in the
parking lots, took out their smart phones and started streaming press conferences so
they can learn where to go for safety.
But with no ASL interpreters integrated into those press conferences, these people who
were deaf and hard of hearing had no way of receiving, processing or acting on the life-saving
information that everyone else around them was getting.
And so, with their lives on the line, they were forced to rely on text messages from
family and friends in order to get to safety.
So, to every colleague, friend, emergency manager, community organizer, partner stakeholder
that is hearing my voice or reading this text, I will simply say we can do better.
And we need to do better, because lives are in the balance.
Can you go to the next slide Alex?
So the disasters we faced in 2017 illustrated clearly for the communities we serve that
integration of access and functional needs is often the difference between life and death.
Of the individuals who lost in last year, an overwhelming number of them had access
or functional needs.
This is the reality of what we experience and were it not for the tremendous work that
we've been doing together, the number of people who have died and the number of people
who suffered would have been even greater.
Ours is a mission to save and reduce suffering, and to save lives and reduce suffering.
As we are in 2018, embark on this year we can and should use what we learned last year
to recommit ourselves in a more meaningful and impactful way.
And that's how we make this year better than the year before it.
As it relates to climate change, I will simply say this: we can debate what to call it, whether
it's man-made, whether it's real, what you cannot debate is the reality of what I've
seen on a day-to-day basis.
Storms, fires, floods, disasters of all types that are far worse than anything we've seen,
whose frequency is far greater than what we've ever experienced and whose impacts are more
devastating than anything that we've ever gone through.
That's the reality of what we are dealing with here.
So if we don't start to make adaptation plans and integrate our best planning process
to account for access and functional needs will, then we are in a very very real way
leaving ourselves hanging in the balance.
So it's my hope that we can use these types of partnerships and the work that each of
you do, to work to promote a safer and more secure California.
Thank you.
Alex: all right, thank you so much Vance and I think now we will transfer it over to Linda
so that Linda, you can, let's see here…
All right, change presenter, that's what I did.
Linda: thank you Alex and thanks so much.
Can you hear me?
Alex: Yep, hear you just fine.
Linda: can you see my screen?
Alex: Yep Linda: great.
Well it's an honor to work and learn from both Vance and.
Oops, sorry.
No.
Is it showing?
There we go.
It's an honor to work and learn from both Vance and Alex.
I was very thrilled when I met Alex and we had the opportunity to work together on several
occasions and capacities over the past several years.
This is an area that I think needs more attention and so we've been collaborating on several
projects.
I live in Mendocino County and that's where 9 people died in the Redwood Valley fire initially,
in the wine country fire storm on October 8.
And of the 44 killed in that firestorm in Sonoma, Mendocino and Napa counties, more
than as Vance said were either elderly and or had a disability.
In Redwood Valley, 83-year-old Jane Gardner was a talented needlepoint artist.
At 130 in the morning, she called her stepson to say that her house was surrounded by flames
and that she and her caretaker, 64-year-old Charlene, or Charlie Foster, were waiting
to be rescued.
And that rescue never came.
So our program, the Climate Change and Health Equity Program, embeds health and equity in
California climate change policy and planning and embeds climate change and equity in public
health policy and planning.
We work with local state and national partners to ensure that climate change mitigation and
adaptation activities have beneficial effects on health while not exacerbating already existing
health inequities or creating new inequities.
We implement California's climate change laws and executive orders, contributing health
equity considerations and we work to reduce vulnerability to climate impacts by improving
living conditions with and for people facing health inequities.
Our conception of climate resilience starts with the Asian Development Bank's definition,
which is the ability to survive and recover from, and even thrive, in changing climatic
conditions.
And we move beyond it to Movement Strategy Center's understandings of the goal of climate
adaptation should not be to simply help bounce back after disasters and other climate effects,
because the underlying conditions of inequitable political power, participation in decision-making,
and access to opportunities and resources will need to be changed in order to improve
quality of life, health and sustainability.
Instead, communities seek to bounce forward, to a renewable, sustainable economy marked
by inclusive participate in the policy decisions that affect their daily life before, during
and despite climate change -related events.
I would say in the state we are in the infancy of incorporating considerations for people
with disabilities into climate policies.
And we have a ways to go to do so successfully.
I cannot speak for other agencies, but I can tell you about the arenas in which my program
has been involved in shaping the state policy guidance to take people with disabilities
into consideration.
In contrast to Vance, we work more on the prevention side, so working on policies to
lessen underlying vulnerabilities of communities so that they are more resilient as I said,
before, during and after disasters.
The first area in which we've worked is the public health chapter of Safeguarding
California, California's Climate Change Adaptation Plan.
In 2017, our program upgraded the document, integrating more than 150 comments from over
80 stakeholders and 9 public meetings.
This public health chapter of the plan articulates the action steps that state agencies, especially
the California Department of Public Health, are doing and plan to do to reduce the health
and equity harms of climate change.
This chapter recognizes that climate change does not affect all people equally, and resources
must be focused on supporting the resilience of the people most vulnerable to the effects
of climate change.
People experiencing historical and current disadvantage due to discrimination based on
poverty, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, geography, immigration status
and age tend to experience worse health outcomes on average.
When these worse health outcomes developed through systemic, preventable and unfair distribution
of power and economic resources, that's when they are called health inequities.
People experiencing health inequities are also likely to have fewer resources to prepare
for, adapt to, and recover from the effects of climate change.
The capacity for resilience in the face of climate change is significantly driven by
living conditions and the forces that shape them such as wealth, education, housing, transportation
and environmental quality, and access to resources and services such as healthcare, healthy foods,
spaces for physical activity, and thus strategies such as alleviating poverty, improving living
conditions, increasing access to opportunities at reducing health and social inequities will
result in more climate resilient communities.
In addition to the public health chapter, the emergency management chapter, informed
by the Office of Access and Functional Needs, led by Vance, has several action steps addressing
the risks to people with disabilities from climate impacts and calling for collaboration
to build community resilience.
And also the Parks, recreation and culture and land use and community development chapters
of Safeguarding California also have considerations for people with disabilities.
For example, the land use and community development chapter calls for assessing and addressing
the climate vulnerability of state funded facilities such as housing, that accommodate
vulnerable populations including people with disabilities and protecting that housing.
The upgraded Safeguarding California adaptation plan will be released later this month, and
a couple days at the website on your screen.
As Alex said, it is essential to address the root causes of climate vulnerability, which
we see as the same root causes of health inequities which are the inequitable distribution of
power, resources and decision-making.
A project in our climate change and health equity program, the Cal BRACE, or Building
Resilience Against Climate Effects, project, which is funded by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, is responding to the reality that climate change is happening now
and some communities are bearing disproportionate health impacts.
The Cal BRACE project developed climate change and health vulnerability indicators for California,
which you can see on your screen.
These indicators can help define the scope of climate impacts and identify the populations
and locations most vulnerable to those impacts.
The climate change exposure indicators are heat, air quality, drought, wildfires and
sea level rise.
The adaptive capacity indicators include air-conditioning ownership, tree canopy, impervious surfaces,
and public transit access.
Population sensitivity indicators include children, elderly, poverty, education, race
and ethnicity, outdoor workers, vehicle ownership, linguistic isolation, disability, health insurance,
and violent crime rate.
Many of these are available at census tract level and others at the county and regional
level.
The data are in Excel spreadsheets available on our website along with a description of
why each indicator is relevant to climate change and health equity.
All of these have evidence-based relationships with additional vulnerabilities to health
effects of climate change.
Many of the indicators can be stratified by race and ethnicity, as well, to help target
resources.
The Cal BRACE project also developed the Climate Change and Health Profile Report, and you
can see the cover of the report right there throughout the county, San Luis Obispo County.
They include data, maps and charts that outline climate projections and conditions that leave
people more vulnerable to climate change, separate for each county.
Each county profile report includes background in climate change climate projections, for
the county and region, an overview of the health impacts of climate change, a description
of the most vulnerable populations and the strategies and action steps.
Exposure indicators include precipitation, sea level rise, heat waves, and fire risk.
Indicators of health outcomes and inequities that may suggest the need for extra consideration
to prevent health impacts include death rates by race and ethnicity, percent of population
with multiple chronic conditions, as diagnoses by poverty level, heat related emergency room
visits, adult obesity, and living with a disability.
Plus there are 16 social factors associated with harm or protection from climate change
impacts, including population of young children, elderly, poverty rate, working outdoors, violent
crime rate, having air-conditioning, area covered by tree canopy, and other indicators
on the right side of the slide.
Again, many of these indicators are available at the census tract level and stratified by
race or ethnicity, all for the purpose of prioritizing resources to the people and places
that most need them to plan for the impacts of climate change.
The reports are being used by counties to plan for the impacts of climate change and
by several state and local planning and grant processes to identify places for prioritized
investment.
The final tool into which we have injected considerations for people with disabilities
in light of climate change is Planning and Investing for a Resilient California, released
by the governor's Office of Planning and Research.
Gov. Jerry Brown declared in Executive Order B-30-15 in 2015 that state agencies shall
take climate change into account in their planning and investment decisions, and that
because climate change will disproportionate affect the state's most vulnerable people,
all state agencies planning and investment shall protect the state's most vulnerable
populations.
This was the first mandate in the United States requiring all state agencies to plan for climate
change and to protect vulnerable people while doing so.
In response the executive order, the Gov.'s Office of Planning and Research created a
technical advisory group to create guidance to help state agencies incorporate the climate
change impacts in planning and investment decisions.
I served on that group and chaired the equity and vulnerable communities sub- committee
to develop a checklist of considerations for state agencies to prioritize communities facing
inequities in their plans and investment and ensure that they advance health and equity.
We invited representatives from state agencies, nonprofits, health equity, climate justice
and environmental justice groups to help craft the guidance.
And Alex participated in the group and provided valuable input to the guidance.
The essence of the guidance is that achieving a fair distribution of power and access to
resources requires prioritized investment and opportunities in and for communities facing
historical and continuing inequities.
This prioritized equity focused approach to investment and resource allocation aims to
reduce vulnerability to harm from climate change.
The direction is for every state agency, through whatever function they perform, to identify
ways to prioritize resources to people facing inequities while accounting for climate change
impacts.
To help state agencies' staff identify communities or places in which to invest and support,
the guidance document describes factors that contribute to vulnerability of people and
communities to the impacts of climate change, including existing inequities, institutionalized
racism or exclusion, disinvestment and resource deprivation, historically experienced by communities
facing inequities that lead to degraded living conditions and a lack of power over decisions
that affect their lives.
Poor environmental conditions, access services or living conditions such as being uninsured
or lacking access to healthcare, transportation, living in areas with poor air quality, upper
floors of tall buildings in areas with lots of impervious, hard surfaces and little tree
cover, or working outdoors.
And the final factor contributing to climate vulnerability is physical states or conditions
that increase vulnerability, such as being elderly, very young, pregnant, having a disability,
chronic health conditions or mental illness.
The guidance also describes Intersectionality, people often experience multiple forms of
vulnerability or injustice at once.
So for example, a significant proportion of people with disabilities are also people of
color and experience racism.
And people with disabilities tend to have lower incomes and less secure employment,
which may also elevate people's risk of harm from climate change.
Some people with disabilities may have conditions or take medications that interfere with thermal
regulation or their ability to regulate body temperature, increasing their risk for heat
illness.
The guidance has a section on the importance of genuine engagement of the community in
major decisions and provides tips and best practices so that decisions are improved through
increased input from different perspectives.
There's more buy-in and acceptance of decisions and support for the implementation, and to
give people a voice and decision-making power over actions that affect their lives.
This guidance for conducting community engagement suggest closed captioning and accessible media
for people with disabilities.
We developed a checklist of considerations for state agencies to help them ensure that
plans and investments identify and protect the state's most vulnerable populations.
Some of the questions include: which vulnerable populations may be impacted by or could benefit
from your policy initiative, budget or program?
How may the policy initiative, program or budget increase racial equity or decrease
inequality in income or wealth?
How may it ensure safety and improved health outcomes for vulnerable populations, including
people with disabilities?
How will you ensure that vulnerable communities are prioritized for employment and job training?
And do you have dedicated set-asides for vulnerable communities?
Every agency is supposed to look at those questions and answer them for every major
planning investment project.
Again, the essence of increase in equity is prioritizing resources for people or communities
facing inequities.
These resources can include extra financial investment, incentives or resources; higher
levels of service or facilities; capacity building or training and jobs; or as Jaribe
La Islas says, cash, capacity and control.
The guidance for State agencies was released at the end of last year by the Office of Planning
and Research and is available at the URL on the website on the slide.
So that is the end of my presentation and I really want to thank Alex and Marsha for
inviting me and for their great work, I really enjoyed collaborating and looking forward
to this discussion with all of you.
Alex: great thank you!
And really appreciate your part of the presentation.
Actually before I wrapped things up, we have a couple of questions.
The first one is if this will, recorded session be available afterward and we are recording
this and as soon I will make sure that the transcript and captioning are accurate to
put up on YouTube, that'll be up, hopefully sometime next week, and I will certainly email
that out to everybody that was signed up for the event as well as over the New Earth Disability
listserv, that I'm sure a lot of you got this announcement through.
And the 2nd question, which I think is probably good for Vance to answer, is in terms of your
partnerships, during events the hurricane, when trying to get appropriate accommodations
or medications to affected people, how can organizations like a nonprofit help these
people without violating HIPAA?
And can organizations access medical records from state hospitals or Medicaid during an
emergency?
So, to either view or Vance have a thought on that?
Vance: sure.
So we do set that up and we have protocols in place to ensure people can get the medications
they need.
The issue typically isn't getting the medicine, the issue tends to be a lot of times that
people don't have contact info for the doctors or they're not clear on exactly the medicines
that they need, so if you've got somebody that's, that's really clear and they say
look I take XY and Z medicines and these are my dosages, this is the dosage and here's
the contact info for my medical provider, my doctor, then you know that stuff lines
up pretty quick.
But what we run into without exception is go to a shelter and somebody will say, "I
mean my heart medicine and I have to take it every day," and they ask, well what,
what do you take?
And they say "well it's a red pill and a blue pill and one is a circle and once a
triangle."
And they go, well who is, what's your doctor's name?
"Well my daughter, she knows that."
But what's your number?
"I don't have my phone and I don't have her number memorized."
Right, and it's those types of obstacles that typically really present themselves as
a greater challenge, so we strongly encourage and urge for people to have all their info
with them, put it in your phone, write it on a paper, but keep it on your person so
that you can get the medicines you need when you need them without having to miss doses.
Alex: yeah, certainly I think a big part of, and thanks for that answer, a big part of
– the emergency response is kind of a two-sided coin, and one part is the organizations and
the agencies that interact with the community and number 2 is the things that individuals
can do to guarantee their own safety and well-being.
And certainly I know that the Red Cross has recommendations and these things are available
online about what they recommend to have a "go bag" – what, a week's worth of
medications and some information about your medical needs and, if possible, to have a
few more basics on, as Vance said on your person, that's incredibly valuable as well.
So, there's one more question which is, what can people with disabilities do transportation
-wise that are low-zero emissions that are accessible?
I don't necessarily have that as an official description.
One thing is, you know the whole idea of all what they call quote "walkable" integrated
communities that have bike paths or smooth sidewalks that people with disabilities can
easily navigate without having to hop into a car is really valuable.
And then well-functioning public transportation that is accessible and responsive to the needs
of people with disabilities is really valuable in that it can also lower carbon footprints.
Linda: so I'll just add to Alex that more advances are being made all the time for electric,
larger vehicles like transit vehicles, accessible transit vehicles and vans and low-carbon fuels
for those so there are lots of options beginning to be available and I would just encourage
people to get involved and talk with their local transportation planning agencies and
ask and demand that they get those things for you.
Alex: great thanks!
You know what, we have another couple of questions coming.
I'm just going to wrap up my and try to do with enough time for about 5 more minutes
to get to everything, so feel free to type in questions into the Q&A box as well.
But I'll go through the "what's next" right here with a picture of our fine California
state capital.
Can, I guess I can hear Vance and Linda, can you see this?
Are we good to go?
Linda: yes this year slides on the left, it's not full-screen, I see your slides.
Alex: oh, it's not full-screen?
Vance: oh I got it Alex: great.
Well, we will, what's next is due a few different things.
I think number one is, and I really appreciate everyone here and hope that you can spread
the word is, building awareness and policies.
And the way that I put this forward is analyze, educate, advocate and implement.
So analyzing is, number one analyzing the current situation and then also what the future
will be.
So analyzing the current situation is identifying key actors and their work and it can be researchers,
we actually just had somebody who had entered a question saying that they have done a lot
of research that could be incredibly valuable.
Get individuals, academics, international organizations such as International Panel
on Climate Change, and become familiar with climate change in general.
Understand policymakers of the global, national and local levels, and there's some incredibly
powerful about being able to build connections and relationships with policymakers and decision-makers
at the local levels.
We found, you know Vance was mentioning Independent Living Centers, that these are local agencies
and entities that can be incredibly valuable partners.
And then as well advocacy groups and nonprofits that can push for change and push for policy
change and take some of the hearing California and elsewhere and try to spread them as far
as possible.
Asking then, are people with disabilities considered?
How and how not?
Whether we are simply a bullet point in a list of "vulnerable" groups or specific
disabilities.
And as I was watching Linda's bit there, also recognizing that disability is not just
wheelchair or no wheelchair.
It's incredibly complex and there are a lot of intersecting and overlapping personal
characteristics and communities, and so recognizing kind of the dynamism of that is really valuable
as well.
And how will people with disabilities be impacted by climate change?
We touched a lot of this will go up but as I mentioned is also really dynamic and then
also how can policies and actions change the impact?
We can say that, we all can't change every single system in the world so also recognizing
and analyzing our own capacity to make change.
Deciding the level of detail to address, identifying and collaborating to really bring others into
this effort.
So analyzing the needs is really breaking things down, even more detailed understanding
the primary and secondary impacts, a lot of which we've talked about already so I'll
kind of skip over this.
As well as regional differences, we are talking about what's going on here in California,
a question that just came up with somebody who had done research and recognized a lot
of the hurricane effects that go on, say in the Gulf Coast.
And there are regional differences but there is also similarities.
Vance was showing photos of flooding that had gone on in the kind of River basins of
the Central Valley and some of the mountainous areas here in California, and that has connections
to what happened in Houston, and what has happened in other areas of the country.
So identifying the regional differences in terms of impacts, in terms of levels of development,
which certainly can be between nations as well as with the nations and adaptation capacity.
Politics, agencies and disability organization.
And politics can range everything from, you know don't believe in climate at all to
being on the understanding it and being on a very kind of, active edge of responding
and protecting people's well-being in the process.
And then needs regarding social and personal education, and that brings us here to educating
people.
Between disability rights and here's kind of an old oh gosh, cartoon and I forgot that
says "act" and "solar radiation" behind this teacher right here, it looks kind of
like a 60s sketch sort of a thing.
Educating is creating publications and.
You know over here, at WID we've done some writing and editorials and people seem really
responsive, the more it's out there in the web the more people will come across.
Articles, op-eds and videos.
You know, pretty much you can write up a blog post on your website or hopefully contribute
something to a local paper or, gosh just do a quick social media post saying how you saw
this awesome webinar today and how it made you think along those lines.
And then developing more concrete media strategies using conventional or social media.
Contacting key stakeholders and educating them about this.
I think that, myself Vance, Linda and a lot of the people that we've worked with as
this topic has grown – we contact stakeholders leaders and it's not necessarily something
that came into people's minds.
You know, what Vance was saying about having ASL interpreters at announcements might not
come into people's minds, but as soon you say it, they will understand and they will
make change.
And reaching as many groups as possible – because it's not just disability, it's also environmental
justice, it is an incredibly complex network and this is a matter of human rights, recognizing
those groups as well.
Advocating is getting a range of partners, collaborating, including disability rights.
There's an old disability rights phrase, "nothing about us without us," and we
were – Linda and Vance and I as we were preparing, Linda mentioned the Health in All
Policies motto that goes with a lot of public health advocacy and public health issues,
and disability in all policies is there as well.
Recognizing harm prevention in the public health sphere, environmental justice communities,
speaking in terms of people's language and in terms of what they care about.
And then pushing government and international organization based off of their focus, location,
agency, their adaptation plans, whether they have them, implementing them.
Understanding larger reports and even trying to insert a couple of sentences about disability
into larger reports, or about climate change into disability reports, is incredibly valuable.
So, implementing is working with stakeholders system-wide.
Staying involved in policy and actions.
Recording efforts and developing best practices, and actually I was mentioning that we are
recording this webinar, simply being able to have an accessible piece immediate to blast
out – recording efforts and recording media, making that easily replicable is really a
good way to go as well.
And then finally expanding networks, allies and messages and creating a dynamic community.
As we say here, also is that including disability in climate adaptation doesn't even necessarily
have to go climate adaptation, climate adaptation, climate adaptation.
General disability reforms and increases in access are beneficial regardless, and then
they can come in and be beneficial for climate work.
And then something that's instigated by climate change work will be useful long-term.
A fully accessible gym that's used as an emergency shelter is a fully accessible gym
when it's not being used as an emergency shelter.
Climate preparation provides another strong argument really to increase overall accessibility.
And then, I have this little thing on the right: if people migrate to our city, and
we want to be an open and inclusive city as people move, potentially because of climate
-related migration, then we should make it accessible for all.
Are the sorts of language and messaging that we can be using.
And then connecting and coordinating.
The final thing, and Marsha loves to talk about this is the "hope/despair dilemma."
Certainly I think everything that we talked about is pretty sobering, and we do face these
harsh realities.
So how do we balance between the messaging of reduced emissions and hopefully stop climate
change – which there's only so much that we can do, and a certain amount is built into
the system – versus preparing in the meantime and keeping our heads up as we do it?
It's understanding that, understandable that people will feel like they want to give
up and say "well, screw it I'm gonna just go and party it up for the rest of my life,"
that's not what we should be doing.
Now, we can have community gatherings and build up a community with fun events, but
we shouldn't submit to denial and isolation and things along those lines.
So just think in the future, what you can do, how you can stay informed and the actions
that you can take.
Here: how can you help?
Think about your interests, your, your organizations, your connections and your capacity for change.
And then start to educate health, to educate others, prepare, spread the word, strategize
and organize and advocate.
And collaborate.
So thank you everybody we have just a few more minutes for Q&A.
This is my information right there, and the question right here: Suzanne, can we have
access to these presentations in electronic form?
If you'd like so, please just shoot me an and then we can connect over having the presentations
in an electronic form.
My contact info is right there.
And Sabrina mentioned: I have solid research from my dissertation addressing direct political
power components that contribute to everything addressed in the webinar today.
I realize that the example used here today, however my research is cognizant of all states
but it has been determined from my data metrics that Mississippi predictably has the worst-case
scenario, which with a low-lying topography of Mississippi and its vulnerability to storms
is certainly important.
How can I help you guys in your efforts?
So, certainly I'd love to see it and include it in any of the research that we do.
Vance or Linda, is that useful to you as well?
Linda: absolutely, I'd love to see it.
Vance: that would be great, thank you.
Alex: great.
Well, thank you everybody.
The family has any other thoughts – or Vance and Linda, any closing thoughts?
Linda: I just wanted to add one little bit of hope, Alex you asked on your slide that
there, what ideas for keeping hope do we have?
And one of the things we do in our program is coordinate the public health workgroup
of the climate action team and its quarterly public meeting that's also provided via
webex and Internet live streamed, and it's coming up February 7 in the afternoon from
1 to 330.
And each time a different topic of interest climate change and health equity, and this
time our focus is on healthy soils.
And I know that when I discovered a few years ago that regenerative agriculture, Agro-ecology
or carbon farming practices can actually take excess carbon from the air where it's doing
so much harm and get back into the soils and plant matter where has all sorts of benefits
and beneficial effects on the plants, on their resistance to climate impacts, on their nutrition,
on yield and may even help reduce the need for pesticides, fertilizers and it absorbs
water and helps prevent flooding.
So there's all sorts of beneficial effects and it's really the only proven way that
we have already to put carbon from the air back into the soil, so it's a great source
of hope.
Alex: fantastic Linda: and people can go, just Google "public
health workgroup" it's on the air resources website if they would like more information
on the public health workgroup.
Alex: and certainly there is a ton of things going on in California, such as green urban
roofs and urban gardens that not only suck carbon dioxide out of the air but also reduce
the urban heat island effect and just make people feel better.
Because it's nice to have some plants around.
So, there's certainly positive things going on.
Everybody, thank you so much we are going to stop recording right now and if you have
any questions, feel free to get in touch.
Hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, thank you so much for joining.
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