Tribal Climate & Health Adaptation Workshop
June 5-6, 2019
Pala Casino Conference Center
Pala, California
Tribal Climate & Health Adaptation Workshop
Some of the most tragic impacts of climate change are projected to come in the form of illness, injury, and death, which will disproportionately impact the most vulnerable members of a community. A comprehensive tribal climate change adaptation plan can help Native American tribal communities better understand, prepare for, and protect against such impacts. However, many adaptation plans place greater emphasis on environmental, infrastructural, or other issues and do not adequately analyze human health concerns. This may be because there can be an overwhelming amount of potential human health impacts and limited resources to obtain, understand, or analyze this information.
This 2-day, interactive training will provide steps, tools, templates, case studies, and other resources that seek to streamline the adaptation planning process and make it easier for tribal health and environmental professionals to understand and address human health exposures and impacts within tribal communities. This training will summarize the latest data and literature on the exposures and impacts of climate change that may impact the health of tribal community members. It will also describe how to identify and select appropriate strategies to address these exposures and impacts.
This training originates from the Pala Environmental Department and the Tribal Climate Health Project (TCHP), a grant-funded initiative awarded to the Pala Band of Mission Indians to help tribal communities across the country build capacity to address the health impacts of climate change. The TCHP is developing a comprehensive online training course and platform for this purpose which includes an extensive and growing clearinghouse of relevant information and resources.