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Virginia Tech professor receives NASA grant to study health costs related to extreme weather

Crystal Graham
Julia Gohlke Virginia Tech
Submitted photo

When there is extreme weather including flooding, heat waves, and extreme cold, the government gets to work to ensure its disaster-relief spending has the greatest impact. The analysis is often based on damages to infrastructure.

A Virginia Tech associate professor has put together a team to study health and assign costs to the results, calculating the health damages of extreme weather, with a $1 million grant from NASA.

Julia M. Gohlke, an associate professor of environmental health in the department of population sciences at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech, will work alongside co-principal investigators Ryan Calder, assistant professor of environmental health and policy at the college; Samarth Swarup of the University of Virginia; and Benjamin Zaitchik of Johns Hopkins University.

“I’m really excited about the applied aspects of this grant. I’ve worked on the epidemiology side, figuring out the detrimental health impacts of these extreme weather events, and I’m really excited about translating that into a policy framework that I know that the U.S. government is actually using,” said Gohlke.

Current analyses don’t fully take into account health damages, which means that total damages are underestimated and Americans may not be receiving the support they need to fully recover from extreme weather events.

For example, Gohlke said, “If a family gets sick because their houses are full of mold after a flood, the government’s damage estimate would not include the damage to their health. With improved methods of estimation, experts can make better informed decisions about disaster relief spending and more.”

These calculations are used in the formation of policy, and agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can use the data to write regulations.

Better health damage accuracy also will change the way the government calculates the cost of climate change. This information will be of particular use to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s list of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters and the EPA’s Social Cost of Carbon calculations, according to a news release from Virginia Tech.

In addition to calculating overall cost, the research team will examine damages at the census tract level to see who is hardest hit by these events.

“When you think about flooding and hurricanes, coastal communities are obviously going to be hit a lot harder than inland, but the opposite may be true for extreme heat events. So we’re looking at the distributional cost too. Who are the winners and losers for each one of these extreme weather events?” said Gohlke.

Through this grant, Gohlke will expand upon a previous NASA grant that examined emergency room visits after Hurricane Harvey.

The veterinary college is dedicated to One Health, the philosophy that human health, animal health, and environmental health are inextricably linked and interdependent. The program emphasizes and encourages interdisciplinary collaboration within this framework.

Crystal Graham

Crystal Graham

Crystal Abbe Graham is the regional editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1999 graduate of Virginia Tech, she has worked for nearly 25 years as a reporter and editor for several Virginia publications, written a book, and garnered more than a dozen Virginia Press Association awards for writing and graphic design. She was the co-host of "Viewpoints," a weekly TV news show, and co-host of Virginia Tonight, a nightly TV news show. Her work on "Virginia Tonight" earned her a national Telly award for excellence in television.