South Texas faces profound health challenges as climate change intensifies, and the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at The University of Texas at San Antonio School of Public Health hopes to help people meet those challenges head-on. Professor and founding department chair David Gimeno Ruiz de Porras, PhD, said their focus is on protecting the health of communities and workers.
“We're interested in where people live, but also where people work, and all these interactions in terms of air quality, or water quality, but also heat exposure,” Gimeno explained.
Gimeno also has a ‘think globally, work locally’ approach to running his department. “We want to train people here in the city, Bexar County, South Texas, and also for people to stay,” he said. He’d like to build an army of people working locally in jobs like occupational epidemiology and data analytics to work on health concerns related to a changing climate. “We want people to be able to have opportunities here in the city and in the region, so they don't need to go to another state,” Gimeno explained.
One serious threat from climate change comes from increasing air pollution. The Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences is developing a real-time mobile air quality monitoring system to map air pollution in San Antonio.
“We want to put a box on top of the bus with a bunch of toys that measure air quality,” Gimeno said. They plan to use a VIA bus that weaves in and out of a variety of city neighborhoods, so they’ll get much more data than they would from a stationary box. They can then correlate it with other information, like hospitalizations in a given zip code. That data can be used to make policy decisions to protect the health of people in more polluted neighborhoods.
Climate change will present a variety of additional health challenges, and San Antonio is the perfect place to study solutions, Gimeno said.
“Texas is big enough that we have every climate, every possible disaster,” Gimeno said. “But as well, a lot of different people from different fields are working, trying to find innovative solutions to deal with power and with water quality and with everything.”
So, as we think about the difficulties a changing climate will certainly bring, Gimeno wants you to know that his students in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health will be working hard to mitigate them.
