Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Canada is warming at a rate twice the global average, in northern Canada, it's three times the global average. Communities across Canada are already experiencing direct health impacts from extremes of weather like heat waves and wildfires. These impacts are unequally distributed. The most vulnerable people, people with chronic conditions or in rural and remote areas with limited access to emergency services, bear most of the impact. There is an urgent need to understand and support community-grown adaptation taking place in rural and remote communities in Canada, as there is limited research on local solutions. My core objectives are to understand individuals' and communities' experiences of climate events, how their perception of vulnerability or resilience informs autonomous adaptation at the household or community level, and the types of solutions they believe will promote population health in a rapidly changing climate. This research will use mixed methods, including interviews, focus groups, photovoice, and choice experiments. Community members and community leaders will be able to share their perspectives and experiences. Photovoice, an arts-based method will provide people room for participants to not just tell but show their lived experiences through pictures. Interview and focus group data will be analyzed thematically, photovoice data will be analyzed in collaboration with participants through a meaning-making exercise. Choice experiments will be used to explore the preferences of people on the best ways to promote population health in a changing climate, data will be analyzed using conditional logit models in STATA. This work will highlight areas where policymakers in health authorities and ministries of health can provide funding and support or scale up community-grown adaptation efforts. It will also provide insight into public preferences for interventions aimed at ensuring environmentally sustainable improvements in population health.