Boston

Feb 26, 2024

We are halfway through this year’s Danger Season—the period between May and October when climate change makes extreme weather events more likely—and the unprecedented ferocity and scale of extreme weather have been making headlines and impacting our lives. In the Northeast, we have seen the haze and breathed air heavy with the smoke from Canadian wildfires. We have witnessed destruction by rising floodwaters from heavy rains. It may be more challenging, however, to perceive what is often called an “invisible hazard” or the “silent killer” as the deadliest weather event: extreme heat.

What images come to mind with the questions: how do you see heat? How does heat affect you? Your family, and your community? What helps you cope with heat? What makes your home and neighborhood hotter or cooler than other homes and neighborhoods?

These are the questions that residents of Chelsea and East Boston, MA asked and addressed through a Photovoice project in the summer of 2021. Photovoice is an action-oriented research method of storytelling through photography, and centers participants as co-researchers. These communities are among the hottest in the Boston metropolitan area, categorized as urban heat islands. These areas experience higher temperatures relative to surrounding areas because they have a denser concentration of heat-trapping surfaces and limited green spaces that offer cooling benefits. Wicked Hot Mystic, a community-based heat mapping project, collected air temperature data during a 2021 heat wave and found that Chelsea and East Boston were two of the six hottest communities, reaching temperatures up to 10°F hotter than the coolest areas in the 76-square-mile Mystic River watershed.

The Chelsea & East Boston Heat (C-HEAT) project began in 2020, through partnership between researchers at Boston University School of Public Health and GreenRoots, a grassroots environmental justice organization, and funded by the Barr Foundation. C-HEAT aims to build capacity for Chelsea and East Boston residents and municipal governments to respond to extreme heat events, through the following activities:

As a component of C-HEAT, the Photovoice/Fotovoz project brought together twelve residents from neighborhoods in Chelsea and East Boston to share and document their experiences of urban heat and climate change. These residents were a subset of the group who participated in a temperature monitoring campaign during the previous summer. Through weekly meetings during the summer of 2021, participant-researchers discussed themes and created action messages on heat and climate issues relevant to their communities and immediate concerns. This project culminated in a report and an exhibit in Chelsea City Hall in August 2022, which is now available as a virtual exhibit, featuring a selection of the photos, captions, and calls to action centered around themes of environmental equity. Some themes that emerged were the lack of shading trees, vulnerable populations, the need to be creative when cooling, and issues related to water. More on those themes below.

Residents described tree inequity in their communities in terms of both the citywide shortage of trees—especially in public areas—as well as the locations of existing trees. They documented the greater concentration of trees in wealthier neighborhoods side-by-side with areas where trees are lacking. Alongside their praise for the cooling benefits of trees, they lamented the unbearable conditions in places lacking shade and refuge from the sun, including places they frequent when using public transit and when going about their daily lives. Our findings from C-HEAT’s outdoor temperature sensors support these narratives: on a hot week in 2020, we found an 8°˚F difference between average temperatures in the coolest location, in a waterfront park, and the hottest locations, in downtown Chelsea. This trend has held in the subsequent years of C-HEAT’s temperature collection (2021 and 2022): the waterfront park has remained the coolest location while the hottest locations were in commercial areas surrounded by heat-trapping pavement and few, if any, trees.

The residents’ nuanced discussion led to calls to action for planting more trees in public areas, creating awareness about current green spaces, and accountability for those who are responsible or have the authority for maintaining and improving green spaces (i.e. landlords, home owners, private property owners, the City).

Residents described the needs of and dangers to population groups including outdoor workers, older adults, children, people living with low income with less access to cooling, or those who work in hot indoor environments such as kitchens. The participants centered these groups in their calls for action, including protocols for outdoor worker protection, and extended hours for libraries that serve as cooling centers during heat waves. The calls for action also included environmental interventions such as improvement and increased accessibility to green spaces, installation of shade structures in outdoor areas that vulnerable populations use often, and replacement of outdoor surfaces with cooler materials.

Residents discussed water issues in their community. While Chelsea and East Boston have a substantial amount of waterfront, there is a heavy industrial presence and very limited public access in waterfront areas. Residents expressed the desire to benefit more from the cooling breeze of the waterfront while acknowledging the barriers and burdens of fuel tanks and other industrial uses. In this theme, residents also documented flooding in their communities, connecting it to climate change. The calls to action include improvement to public access to the waterfront, and increasing intergenerational shaded green spaces with water features, as well as a call for municipalities to plan for more water and flooding, and change the way homes are built.

Residents explored their personal cooling strategies as well as needs and opportunities for cooling spaces for the larger community. They described the challenge of keeping their homes cool while limiting energy use in order to save money, including using fans and window shades. Residents with window AC units described them as inefficient and expensive, especially when houses do not have efficient insulation. It is no surprise, then, that our findings from the 2020 temperature monitoring campaign showed that participants’ AC units failed to cool indoor temperatures to residents’ desired levels. Even when they used AC, we found that maximum temperatures in participants’ homes increased with increasing outdoor temperatures. The Photovoice participants discussed barriers to addressing warm indoor living conditions. An important factor in these renter-majority communities is the inequity in the dynamic between renters living with low incomes and their landlords: renters fear retaliation if they were to advocate for improved cooling resources. Therefore, the calls to action address these concerns, centering the needs of vulnerable groups including renters and residents living with low incomes:

We have shared these findings not only with the broader community, but also key community leaders and decision-makers in Chelsea, East Boston, and the region who work at the intersection of public health and heat adaptation.

Informed by these resident-led priorities, the C-HEAT project has partnered with GreenRoots, Chelsea residents, and the Boston Society of Landscape Architects to revitalize a residential block into an inter-generational green space, adding cool roofs to buildings nearby, as part of the Cool Block project.

Community-based participatory action research initiatives such as Photovoice provide the space to center resident needs in decision-making in climate adaptation, and to make visible both the negative effects and the opportunities for progress in our communities.

Our C-HEAT work is showing that solutions are possible, one partnership at a time. It also shows that looking at life during Danger Season—what helps us, what hurts us—is necessary to finding those solutions.

By witnessing these community members’ experiences and receiving their calls to action, we can expose heat’s invisibility and reduce the impacts of this silent killer.

Leila Heidari is a PhD candidate in Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health and a trainee in the Graduate Program in Urban Biogeoscience and Environmental Health (BU URBAN). She applies an environmental justice and community engagement lens to her work on heat exposure and vulnerability. Using quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches, she works with collaborators in BU and at GreenRoots, a grassroots environmental justice organization, on the Chelsea and East Boston Heat Study (C-HEAT) (https://www.c-heatproject.org/).

Posted in: Climate Change

Tags: Boston, climate solutions, community-based research, extreme heat

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