Adapting to Climate Extremes in Arizona: Utilizing a Monitoring and Evaluation Framework to Implement and Improve Climate and Health Interventions

Extreme weather events including heat waves, wildfires, dust storms, flooding, and drought, along with adverse air quality events, are climate-sensitive hazards in Arizona. Climate-sensitive hazards are environmental events that pose risks to human health and could be affected by long-term changes in temperature, precipitation, and other weather conditions. These events occur at a wide range of time scales, spanning short-term events like dust storms to long-term events like drought. The Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) has utilized the Building Resilience Against Climate Effects (BRACE) Framework developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to address these public health hazards. After developing a Climate and Health Adaptation Plan, the Department has partnered with local health departments to initiate pilot climate and health interventions around the state to protect residents and visitors. In order to monitor and improve intervention effectiveness, Arizona has co-developed an Intervention and Monitoring Strategy (IMS) for each intervention implemented utilizing expertise of the state health department, local health departments, and university subject matter experts.

The Arizona Department of Health Services has partnered with 3 local health departments (Maricopa, Pinal, and Yuma) Counties based on climate and health hazard needs of the local health jurisdiction. Maricopa developed and promoted a public health safety award recognizing individuals, businesses, and non-profits excelling at climate and health efforts to protect residents and visitors. Pinal County implemented enhanced heat surveillance methods to rapidly identify heat illness cases in hospitals and provide public health safety messages to organizations serving vulnerable populations. Yuma County evaluated the use of deployed cooling centers during the summer in order to identify improvements and reduce risk to the homeless and others affected by the heat.

Using guidance from CDC, each IMS plan aims to improve performance and quality of the public health intervention by evaluating effectiveness of processes used and success in delivering key outcomes affecting health impacts related to extreme weather. The presentation will share lessons learned on implementing a mini-grant program which evaluates pilot projects. Based on successful results, these projects are aimed at determining if they are effective in scaling to other local health departments in the state, statewide, or used in other areas around the country.