Extreme Weather Environment

Extreme Weather Environment

Overview

The Extreme Weather domain considers a wide range of factors that affect aging, including rising outdoor temperatures and increasing risk of extreme weather events such as wildfires, flooding, and extreme heat. The Extreme Weather domain seeks to accelerate the pace of research on these topics by providing the scientific community with guidance, advice, and access to innovative data and resources.

The Extreme Weather domain’s initial efforts will focus on extreme weather events, exposome research, population resilience, and long-term exposures to heat.

Extreme Weather Events Extreme Weather Events

Extreme weather events — such as wildfires, floods, and heat waves — pose significant risks to both mental and physical health in aging populations. Older adults face heightened vulnerability to these events due to factors like reduced mobility, preexisting conditions, and social isolation, which can hinder response and recovery.

Beyond immediate dangers such as respiratory distress, heat-related illness, and injuries, repeated exposures may have lasting effects on brain health. Air quality, extreme heat, and disaster-related stress have been linked to cognitive decline, neurodegenerative risk, and worsening mental health. More research is needed to understand these mechanisms and develop strategies to protect older adults from the cumulative impacts of extreme weather.

Exposome Research Exposome Research

Addressing environmental health risks requires innovative research that spans all of the GECC domains that are traditionally siloed. Multidisciplinary groups like GECC are well-suited to accelerate the pace of research by prioritizing key research questions, creating globally consistent markers of exposure to hazardous weather, advising on the use of novel exposure metrics, and facilitating translation of research insights into community- or region-specific interventions.

Population Preparedness Population Preparedness

While all individuals and communities face risks from hazardous weather exposures, some are more able to mitigate risks or respond to harmful exposures. Further research is essential to understand how exposures and impacts of hazardous weather and disasters vary across individuals, locations, and time, to enable the development of effective interventions tailored to the needs of specific communities.

Long-term Exposures to Extreme Heat Long-term Exposures to Extreme Heat

Chronic exposure to high temperatures and the urban heat island effect can pose unique risks to cognitive and mental health in older adults. In addition to acute events, these exposures may operate through slower, cumulative pathways. More research is needed to better understand how the cumulative impacts of environmental stressors influence the risk of dementia.

Community Insights

In the fall of 2024, the GECC hosted a series of town hall meetings with hundreds of unique participants. These meetings and additional conversations with domain experts yielded critical insights for the Extreme Weather domain, including highlighting key themes and gaps in research.

Key Themes

  • Extreme weather-related exposures and health impacts are diverse, complex, and not fully understood.
  • The lack of a shared conceptual framework hinders research on extreme weather and healthy aging.
  • Extreme weather affects health through multiple, interwoven pathways, varying across populations and locations.
  • There is strong interest in research that informs short-term solutions, despite challenges in implementation and scalability.

Gaps in Research

  • Limited understanding of how extreme weather-relevant hazards translate into individual exposures and subsequent health impacts.
  • Poorly understood physiological pathways linking extreme weather-related exposures to health outcomes.
  • Lack of specificity in research framing—broad topics like “extreme weather and healthy aging” may obscure actionable questions
  • Insufficient mechanisms for fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing across disciplines.
Priorities

Overview

  • Write an article identifying key evidence gaps and research priorities for understanding the potential impacts of heat, environmental disasters, and droughts on dementia risk.

Acute Environmental Disasters

  • Summarize available data and metrics relevant to disaster research and provide guidance on when to use each based on contextual evaluation criteria.
  • Create or provide novel measures of different types of disasters at the U.S. county level over time, using the spatial hazard events and losses database for the United States (SHELDUS) data.

Temperature Extremes & Heat Islands

  • Critically review the literature on temperature extremes and urban heat islands that identifies key research gaps and presents a framework for conceptualizing long-term effects of heat.
  • Disseminate datasets summarizing heat metrics at the county level for the U.S. – potentially including temperature, heat index, wet bulb globe temperature (WGBT), universal thermal climate index (UTCI), and others.
  • Identify datasets with more spatially refined metrics of temperature and humidity for the U.S.
  • Calculate annual and seasonal canopy urban heat island (CUHI) intensity for U.S. metropolitan areas at the census tract level.
  • Provide guidance and guardrails regarding the preferred use of the above measures.
Team

Gregory Wellenius

Boston University

Domain Co-Lead

Kevin Lane

Boston University

Domain Co-Lead

Allison James

Boston University

Research Fellow

Lucy Hutyra

Boston University

Domain Expert

Emma Gause

Boston University

Research Scientist

Zach Popp

Boston University

Research Data Analyst

Talia Feldscher

Boston University

Research Fellow

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Contact us at contact@gatewayexposome.org

The GECC is funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) U24AG088894.