Supporting Community Resilience in Response to Extreme Weather

In April 2026, researchers from CEAL’s Alliance for Community Engagement – Partnership for Action Toward Health (ACE-PATH) teams will join colleagues from across the country to study the complex health effects of extreme weather conditions in U.S. communities. The gathering in Bethesda, Maryland, is organized by the NIH Program on Health and Extreme Weather (HEW). HEW is an NIH-wide initiative whose administrative home, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), also funds ACE-PATH’s work. Ahead of the HEW symposium, we asked ACE-PATH teams to share an update on their community-engaged research projects. Below are excerpts from responses from Katherine Dickinson, Ph.D. (University of Colorado Denver’s Mountain West Hub); Karsten Hueffer, Ph.D. (University of Alaska [AK] Fairbanks’ AK-ACE team); and Sarah Ryan (Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, CHARM Lake County project).

How does your team’s research project tie in to the HEW initiative and its aim to “support critical health research, disseminate findings to the public, and catalyze interventions that promote health in the wake of extreme weather occurrences?”

Dickinson: Communities across the Mountain West are eager to find effective ways to protect themselves from wildfire smoke, dust storms, and other contributors to poor air quality in the region. Do-it-yourself (DIY) air cleaners are a potentially effective, low-cost solution, but prior studies have not looked at acceptability and impacts in low-resource rural and urban areas. The Mountain West Hub is helping to address this gap and provide evidence to promote health in our region and beyond.

Hueffer: Our AK ACE initiative examines stressors on community health that affect subsistence resources crucial for individual and community health and well-being. In the last couple of years, extreme weather events related to typhoons in the Pacific Ocean, whose remnants inundated communities in our remote study area, have affected infrastructure related to health in many communities.

Ryan: The Community Health and Resilience Mobilization (CHARM) Lake County project addresses local needs and gaps in services during extreme heat events that impact the area. Our study is setting up and studying the impact of interventions to help our most affected communities, including the unhoused, senior or disabled individuals, and Tribal communities, protect themselves and their communities to navigate these extreme weather events.

How did community-informed learnings in Phase I of your team’s research shape the current course of your study?

Dickinson: Our investment in listening and relationship-building has shaped all aspects of our study. Communities identified air quality as a top concern, so we prioritized feasible interventions to provide cleaner indoor air for households. We also established partnerships with individuals and organizations that make our Phase II study possible and relevant, including the two stellar Community PIs who are part of our leadership team.

Hueffer: Phase I showed us that communities prioritize traditional practices and their transmission to youth as important factors to increase resilience to environmental stressors. In Phase II, we will implement and assess the effectiveness of interventions that strengthen traditional practices in communities to address environmental stressors.

Are there any early findings or lessons learned from your work that you can now report? 

Hueffer: Our main findings so far are that communities view health holistically, encompassing the health of communities, animals, and the environment as a whole. Extreme weather events affect health through the inability to engage in traditional cultural practices and harvest healthy foods.

Ryan: We have learned that people rely on personal relationships and trusted spaces, like community centers or senior centers, for help and information during extreme heat events. This informed our site-based approach, in which we will focus on meeting participants where they are comfortable, training trusted staff to provide outreach, and accommodating different communication needs.

What is your vision for how your team’s work will contribute to long-term community resilience against regional health stressors, even after the project concludes?

Dickinson: On one level, our partners will be able to promote and scale up the use of DIY air cleaners in homes and community spaces using the knowledge we create together. Also, the connections within and across communities that are necessary to carry out this work will continue to spur new opportunities for collective action at multiple scales to tackle extreme weather challenges in the region.

Hueffer: By empowering our partner communities to better drive change and have agency over their destiny as Indigenous communities, we strive to support them in building strength-based approaches to confront challenges to individual and community health and well-being.

Ryan: We anticipate that our intervention will strengthen resilience to extreme heat events in the long term at both the individual and community levels. The project will also build the capacity of partner organizations to continue this work after the funding period, protecting and improving health outcomes for at-risk populations in the face of extreme weather events.

Learn about the NIH Program on Health and Extreme Weather.