The Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative will integrate environmental, health and community response data to drive potential climate solutions that support equity and resilience.
November 17, 2022
Originally published in Route Fifty
To better understand the effects of climate on Baltimore residents, a multidisciplinary research effort called the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC) is monitoring environmental and health data and soliciting resident feedback.
The collected data will support a study of the interdependent environmental, ecological, infrastructure and human components of urban systems and guide climate solutions and community-scale resilience. Data on air quality, emissions and weather impacts on Baltimore will help policymakers prepare equitable solutions based on data-driven models.
Baltimore’s infrastructure, population, potential for increased heat and floods and air and water pollution make it an ideal laboratory for climate solutions. It is also representative of many industrial cities across the country.
“Part of what we want to do is be able to predict climate change conditions and air quality conditions at the neighborhood scale,” said Kenneth Davis, atmospheric and climate professor and principal investigator of the team from Penn State, one of the participating universities. “In order to test if our models do the right thing, we need measurements at the neighborhood scale that we can compare to.”