GeoHealth Policy & Learning Resources
To learn more about AGU's GeoHealth Section, visit https://connect.agu.org/geohealth/home Follow us on Twitter: @AguGeohealth. Read more at A GeoHealth Response to a Geoscience Community Climate Change Position Statement (Rehr et al 2020).
AGU provides support for member comments on its position statements (AGU, 2019a), as well as content‐specific information that may be helpful in the comment process, like fact sheets and issue briefs (e.g., the Fact Sheet on Climate Change; AGU, n.d.).
What is GeoHealth ?
Work in Progress Summary Definitions: Read more on this Geohealth Fact Sheet
Geohealth: an emerging field of science that uses the intersection of Earth sciences, ecology, and health sciences to understand how environmental changes or exposures affect and impact agricultural, ecological, and human health and disease.
GeoHealth Policy: For the purpose of determining AGU GeoHealth member consensus on a shared issue of community interest, to qualify as a GeoHealth Policy or GeoHealth-informed decision, an educational or research products or resources used to substantiate the policy position or decision must address the following issues: geo-scalability, info-scalability, and socio-scalability.
Examples of emergent Geohealth research questions include: How will greenhouse gas emission regulations imposed for air pollution reduction after forest fires 2015-2020, impact premature death rates in cities impacted by chronic exposure due to urban air pollution? How is the 2020 hurricane season preparation impacting drinking water and sanitation infrastructure relative to the global burden of disease ? How does weather variability, short term and long term climate trends impact the distribution and exposure of vulnerable populations to viral transmission for vector-borne disease (e.g. Lyme, West Nile) and air-borne disease (e.g. COVID-19, seasonal flu)?
Geo-scalability: geographic scaling for global, community, and individual usability for decisions and communication.
Info-scalability: translational information and knowledge infrastructure strategies aligned with FAIR standards (findable,accessible, inclusive, reproducible) that are scalable (operationalized governance, computations, and distribution) and customizable (trans-science; trans-technology; trans-language) across one or more geoscience disciplines and one or more health disciplines involved in researching processes or mechanisms linked to human health impacts, education and/or mortality.
Socio-scalability: attention to experimental and product design for inclusion of long time scales, extreme short-term conditions, high risks, impacts, behavior, or responses to new physical or environmental conditions and/or technologic advances.
GeoHealth experiments test hypotheses on complex systems which can be measured with earth observations, sensor monitoring data, human subject, education evaluation and/or social research studies and/or simulated as a function of geophysical processes or theory using numerical, physical and/or statistical models.
GeoHealth Case Studies are generally on 'the edge' geographically and technically, and/or 'end-members' numerically and mineralogically or chemically. An edge-end-member geohealth case study or experimental design can be identified as a dynamic intersection of vulnerable ecosystems, communities and individuals with high risk of impact or change. By using case studies from edge-end-member scenarios and research experiments, scientific advancement can be identified with research products that may have profound impacts in a scientific community, and/or broad impacts in collaborative socio-technology, education, informatics, natural hazards, and policy domains.
AGU GeoHealth Section and GeoHealth membership have wide-ranging research areas and applications that connect individual scientists to local and global research and education resources, in order to understand individual impacts connected to cumulative and nested processes, that scale across household, neighborhood, community, regional and global ecoystems. AGU GeoHealth Section members increase scientific understanding and broaden the study of how climate, pollution, hazards, ecosystems, and agriculture shape human and ecological health, as observed in past and current conditions, and projected for future scenarios of geophysical processes, health of human individuals and communities, and ecosystem networks on the Earth.
How are Climate and Mental Health and COVID-19 connected?
Matt Haig just perfectly explained how the climate crisis is linked to our mental health, by Lauren Geall, September 15, 2020.
Proposal for a AGU Fall Meeting Town Hall on Mental Health:
When any AGU member is disrupted or unable to contribute to education and research, we can expect global ripple effects of scientific progress linked to the growth or decline of institutional and physical process understanding within research communities and public knowledge systems, about earth and environmental systems on which human health and society depend.
We need to stop compartmentalising issues. Mental health and environmentalism are related issues. Our detachment from nature, and from our own human nature, is as bad for our minds as it is for our eco system. Our brains are a part of the natural world. They feel its trauma.
— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) September 15, 2020
| Link to a YouTube Interview with Matt Haig | Author of Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet | Link to Sept 24, 2020 Instagram podcast @i_weigh video - or listen where ever you get podcasts |
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Questions
for Invited Speakers, Community Discussion with Moderated Q & A, Interactive Work Sessions to Explore while ensuring 'GeoHealth' policy alignment
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How do we normalize geohealthy* culture shifts that support learning environments, educators and researchers?
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How do we address normal and trauma-informed levels of discomfort to operationalize the use of new tools and geohealth resources*?
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What can I do today to educate myself and others about integrating existing geohealth resources* into my work process?
Geohealthy what? Geohealth does have a definition and an award winning journal academic journal - GeoHealth. But what is a GeoHealth Resource? Culture? or Policy? Here we define 'Geohealth Resources' as a function, process, tool, or digital object that scales global, community, and individual resources (see also definitions above). Building a shared understanding with terms and vocabulary is just one component of a process for determining consensus on position statements, in order to build on and GeoHealth Section leadership work in progress, introduced in the article A GeoHealth Response to a Geoscience Community Climate Change Position Statement (Rehr et al 2020).
@dr_cband example of a GeoHealth Policy from the perspective of an individual scientist: For the COVID-19 impacted 2020 AGU Fall Meeting, GeoHealth Section sponsored Town Hall, we drafted a mental health resource for distribution along with educational resources and workshop tools to address code-of-conduct policy updates in National Science Foundation (NSF) Significant Changes and Clarifications to the Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide Chapter II.E.7, Conferences (2019). The Talk-to-Someone open source online resource is intended for grassroots suicide prevention and mental health promotion by geoscience leaders and learners. We hope this will continue to address known and emerging impacts on careers, online workspaces, and research communities, and to promote a culture shift where we respect ourselves and each other as GEOSCIENCE-MOTIVATED HUMANS first. Platforms, campaigns, and research from within the past two years, are organized for an audience of educators to share in their classroom and online communities. The resource is specific to education about mental health tools and language customized for geo-computer-data scientists (Earth system modelers and environmental software developers - you know who you are). Publicly available on Github, instructions on how to reuse, edit, and contribute are included.
@dr_cband is a geoscientist, not a mental health professional, which is they are sharing an evolving approach for directing colleagues to the professional resources they may need in a crisis, and to intentionally prevent a crisis with increased access to professional resources in my work communities, by normalizing the promotion of mental health and self-care, and sharing everyday tools for interrupting stigma, bias and discrimination related to mental health and suicide. Notably, to the credit of Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research at Colorado State University, after an introduction to methods used in the Suicide Prevention Community, we applied learning about the Community Readiness Model. We are actively testing the use of this approach in Adaptation Infrastructure, GeoHealth Informatics and RAPID disaster research specific to hurricanes, flood modeling and climate change research software development and cybertraining.
This is a meta-meta example of how geoscientists can thrive within humane academic work environments, benefit from scientific methods from other domains, and translate geoscience linkages to physical and mental health. As a hydrologist and civil engineer, @dr_cband studies physical processes of water transport across time scales of natural disaster, spatial scales of variable environments, and extreme future scenarios of social and ecosystem impacts. As a Geohealth Section Member at Fall Meeting 2020, their contributions may scale from championing mental health (inspired by self-respect, colleagues and teams) in a role on the GeoHealth Section Leadership Team (service community), and by leading a RAPID response poster session online for disaster researchers (cyberinfrastructure community) while contributing to hurricane response with data science and cyberinfrastructure tools from biomedical informatics and hydroinformatics (global research community) with experimental methods that include a Call for a GeoHealth during data science cybertraining (cybertraining education community).
@dr_cband example of a GeoHealth Policy from the perspective of an community: [In progress]
"The only way to learn, is to live."
- The Midnight Library, Matt Haig.
Christina's example of a GeoHealth Policy from the perspective of an global community: The value of each human life is immeaureable and irreplaceable. However, we can identify the general level of public investment in a typical academic pathway over a generic 15 years from a funded five years in a PhD program ($50K average salary), five years as an early career researcher ($75K average salary), and five years as an assistant professor approaching tenure review ($150K average salary). With 50% overhead of a typical US institution, $2.75 million tax-payer dollars and 15 years of a professional life will have been invested in only one portion of the costs to educate a geoscience expert. Thanks to a thorough peer review culture, to approach the accomplishment of being in a position to consider applying for tenure, the expertise is generally considered at the peak of global respect, and if a federally funded research, their work is documented as so valuable that it is in the national interest to continue and pursue new ideas. The global peer research community will have identified their contributions as a critical area of ongoing and future research. How much of this investment in a typical 15 years of professional academic investment is reinvested by the typical US based researcher and their US based institution on auto insurance, health insurance and health care? How does this compare to the fraction spent on preventative mental health and self-care? What fraction of the 15 years was spent on preventative mental health and self-care? [ numbers TBD ]
Climate Change Position Statement & Learning Resources
"The only way to learn, is to live."
- The Midnight Library, Matt Haig.
From April 29, 2019 to December 31, 2021, we will be compiling comments on the current AGU Climate Change Position Statement based on the article "A GeoHealth Response to a Geoscience Community Climate Change Position Statement" (Rehr et al., GeoHealth, 2020; submitted) and the GeoHealth Section Comments (link to 2019.10.12 GeoHealth Comments Integrated in AGU Position Statement. This is a review version for additional commenting on GeoHealth Section edits Submitted by Aubrey Miller (President) and Claire Horwell (President-Elect) on behalf of the GeoHealth Section Leadership (October 11, 2019). AGU commenting period ends 2019.10.13.
How to Contribute Comments and Learning Resources
This repository is intended for use developing educational information, including links to resources which support additional comment on the AGU Climate Change Position Statement. It is being hosted by the Waterhackweek community as an educational service through 2020. Please visit our [How to Contribute](link needs to be developed) page for more details.
To access the current AGU Climate Change Position Statement, visit the AGU website at Position Climate. A position statement on climate change was previously adopted by the American Geophysical Union in December 1998; A new version was adopted December 2003; Revised and Reaffirmed December 2007, February 2012, August 2013, November 2019.
To learn more about the AGU Position Statement comment process, see this EOS article (AGU, 2019) and AGU resources on Climate Change including the Fact Sheet on Climate Change.
To learn more about AGU’s GeoHealth Section, visit us on GeoHealth AGU Connect and follow us on Twitter: @AguGeohealth. The community is invited to share and discuss comments about the position statements with us here:
Contact
Brought to you by the American Geophysical Society GeoHealth Section Leadership Team and Policy Committee.
For more information on contributing comments contact Amazing Student.
For AGU GeoHealth information contact Claire Horwell - Section President
For Waterhackweek information contact Dr. Christina Bandaragoda.
Technical notes
- This documentation is built and deployed using mkdocs.
- install mkdocs from conda-forge:
conda install -c conda-forge mkdocs - To develop locally:
mkdocs serve - To publish to GitHub:
mkdocs gh-deploy - This uses the markdown extensions admonition and the markdown plugin markdownextradata
- edit the mkdocs.yml file to customize the name and website to your particular event