Speaker: Grace Wickerson, Senior Manager, Climate and Health, Federation of American Scientists
Grace Wickerson: school. We are in an era where climate change is not going away. Extreme weather events will be here, extreme temperature events will be here, extreme smoke events will be here.
How (and why) are you taking action on climate change solutions in, for, and with your community?
Grace Wickerson: I'm taking action on climate change because I see how it's a social determinant of health and driving, negative health outcomes for people based on where they live, they work, they transit, they play, they go to school. We are in an era where climate change is not going away. Extreme weather events will be here, extreme temperature events will be here, extreme smoke events will be here. And the best that we, things that we should be doing now, it's to really focus on safeguarding, protecting health, and prioritizing health in our decision making going forward as we build uh solutions to stem the real um immense consequences of climate change and also, you know, adapt to our current uh reality of climate change.
Describe a moment when you felt the real-world impact of your work in climate solutions.
Grace Wickerson: A focal point of my effort over the last couple of years has been to really unpack and untangle what extreme heat events are doing to communities, what they're doing to people's health, um, and how do we actually design and think about a future. Of, um, increased adaptation to extreme heat events. And I think some of the real world impact I've seen is just the ability to build these really interdisciplinary collaborative spaces because we can't solve the problem, extreme heat alone. Um, it's going to impact how we live our entire lives. It's gonna change the way we exist in. Um, many parts of the year. And so that ability to bring people together, collaborate, come around a shared agenda, um, which was our 2025 heat policy agenda, was just such an exciting opportunity to see, like, this is an issue, a lot of people care about it and a lot of people need solutions. And so how do we all band together to move the needle on a more adapted future to heat.
Who or what inspires/inspired you to care about climate change and climate solutions?
Grace Wickerson: So extreme weather has always been a part of my life. I grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida and then went to school in Houston, Texas, you know, no stranger to flooding, hurricanes, intense rainfall. Um, what really made me think more about, you know, what extreme weather means to just people in their lives, um, was, you know, living through Hurricane Harvey in 2017 while I lived in Houston. Um, and really seeing, you know, not just a devastating weather event in its own right, but this long, um, change that it did to communities, really creating unlivable conditions, um, decimating small businesses, disrupting the food system, and it was really through this understanding of like these weather events as cascading crises, um, great exacerbators of negative outcomes to people and their health. Um, that just really, you know, struck me and motivated me and like, continues to motivate me as we work to try to think about these health impacts of climate change and really center what people are experiencing um living through this emergent climate crisis.
