Oregonians living in the Portland metro area now have access to a climate dashboard that looks at how the changing environment is impacting their health.
Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties’ regional climate and health dashboards include five health categories impacted by climate change. The data collected by all three counties investigates how extreme weather events like heatwaves or cold snaps, as well as degraded air quality from wildfire smoke, affect public health.
Jamie Test of Portland wipes the water from his face after cooling off in the fountain at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, Sept. 5, 2024. "The heat waves are getting real," said Test, who brought his family to the waterfront for relief from the heat. Excessive heat warnings will remain in effect on Friday.
Alan Zhou / OPB
Multnomah County Health Department’s Brendon Haggerty said the information will help identify and track health indicators so counties can better respond to climate change.
“We selected the indicators based on public health research that finds associations between health outcomes, which means people getting sick or having premature death or injury and some kind of environmental exposure related to climate change,” he said.
The counties are tracking public health impacts from extreme heat, extreme cold and ice events, air quality, infectious disease trends and mental health.
A screen capture of the interactive Heat Vulnerability Index, part of Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties’ regional climate and health dashboards.
Screen capture / multco.us
As the burning of fossil fuels continues to make human-made climate change conditions worse over time, those effects are starting to have yearly ramifications on Oregonians’ health.
According to the data, people with lower incomes, communities of color and unhoused people are feeling the worst effects. In Washington and Clackamas counties, farmworkers, people living alone and people with pre-existing health conditions are most affected during extreme weather.
“The changing climate will affect everyone’s health,” Clackamas County health officer Sarah Present said in a statement. “In public health, we will be able to focus resources helping those who are most at risk, but everyone can use this data to understand their own personal risks.”
Haggerty said some key findings showed hospital visits during extreme heat spiked during the 2021 heat dome event. Nearly 100 people died of heat-related illnesses during that time, with most of those deaths occurring in Multnomah County. Since then, heat-related visits to the hospitals during the summer have remained steady.
“We saw a great big spike during 2021, during the heat dome,” he said. “It came back down, but not all the way down, and it’s just sort of stayed high.”
The dashboard also includes two data categories that track over time: infectious disease and mental health.
The mental health survey findings were the first of their kind for the region and offered more insight into how climate change is detrimental to mental health. The counties saw a link between local climate disasters and increased anxiety and trauma. The survey results also showed people felt extreme sadness, fear and helplessness due to extreme weather.
A screen capture of The Tri-County Climate-Mental Health Survey, part of Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties’ regional climate and health dashboards.
Screen capture / multco.us
As far as infectious diseases, that’s something the counties have recently started to track, Haggerty said. Those are diseases carried by animals and insects. As temperatures rise, favorable habitats increase for mosquitoes and ticks. Those disease carriers are less common in the Pacific Northwest than in other parts of the country, but that could change due to climate change.
“For the most part, those diseases haven’t been a big problem here historically. But what has happened in the last two years is that we’ve seen Aedes aegypti, which is this mosquito that carries dengue fever,” he said.
Though not in the tri-county area, Haggerty said Tacoma, Washington, recorded its first-ever case of locally acquired malaria in August.
“Keeping tabs on these indicators is one way we can watch for if we need to be more aggressive in mosquito control or prevention of vector-borne diseases,” he said.
Haggerty hopes the dashboard can help Oregonians better understand their own risks during extreme weather events and make decisions accordingly.
“I think many people probably don’t consider themselves vulnerable to extreme heat, for example, but especially for those early season events, our bodies haven’t acclimated yet, and we are all vulnerable,” he said.
