A sub-project to the The Climate Lighthouse, among the avenues explored, the Social Heat Impact Index (SHII) research project seeks to address a key challenge in the New York City public health landscape: measuring the social experience of extreme heat in the context of a rapidly warming City. Building on preliminary work done at the NYC Preparedness & Recovery Institute’s (PRI) Narrative 2 Numbers (N2N) mixed methods hackathon, the research team is using qualitative open datasets (311, 911 reports) and social media data to explore disparities in “felt heat” across NYC’s five boroughs. Among the goals of the project are to create a qualitatively-derived “heat sentiment index” which can be mapped spatially and compared with more static, quantitative indicators like the NYC Heat Vulnerability Index (HVI)—identifying neighborhood level gaps for targeted intervention. Key questions that the team seeks to address include: How can NYC government officials more efficiently and equitably identify real-time heat vulnerability at the neighborhood level, and how can patterns in these quantitative-qualitative gaps illuminate future directions in extreme temperature care?
Research Team: Professor Rachael Piltch-Loeb (CUNY ISPH); Kylen Solvik (Columbia Ecology, Environment, and Environmental Biology (E3B); Christin Mourani (NYC DOHMH); Josefina Nunez (CUNY ISPH); Matthew J. Hill (NYC CIDI, CUNY QMSS).