♪ Hey, hey ♪ Hey ♪ Hey, hey ♪ Hey ♪ Hey, hey - Good evening and welcome to Horizonte, a show that takes a look at current issues through a Hispanic lens.

I'm your host Catherine Anaya.

This past October, the bipartisan non-profit environmental advocacy group, Moms Clean Air Force, along with Ecomadres, one of its field organizing programs, hosted an inaugural summit in Phoenix examining extreme weather impacts on Latina, maternal, and children's health.

The event brought together community leaders, health professionals and policy makers to discuss the challenges that Latino families are facing due to climate issues that include extreme heat.

Dr. Eugene Livar, Arizona's first Chief Heat officer from the Arizona Department of Health Services is among the experts who spoke at the summit about the state's public health measures to protect Latino children from extreme heat.

And joining me now to talk more about those measures and the importance of them is Dr. Eugene Livar.

So nice to see you again, doctor.

- So nice to see you too.

- Thank you for being here.

So we have been talking, I feel like we talk about this every time we see each other, about the extreme heat we experienced this past summer.

Phoenix had its hottest summer on record, the hottest September ever recorded in the city.

Studies have shown that Latino community members are disproportionately affected by extreme heat.

Why is that?

- You know, I think when we think about our Latino communities, they are such an integral part of our society, our economy, and our daily living activities that we experience within our state.

And so Latinos are intertwined within the state of Arizona.

And I think when we look at some communities, specifically in urban areas or even in rural areas, there's certain risk factors that can take place among the Latino community.

They may be in lower social economics situations and areas.

They may be experiencing or going through urban heat islands, which are areas with high amounts of asphalt, lower amounts of parks and natural shade or shade structures that are available to them to get relief from heat.

I think we also see a disproportionately amount of Latinos part of our outdoor workforce.

That could be everything from agricultural, to construction, to road work, to different type of vocations that put them into the elements and experience extreme heat.

And then I think, you know, if we think about those type of jobs and vocations, you may have, you know, certain situations that you are dealing with, such as maybe having, you know, a time to mitigate the gaps when it comes to paying utility bills or having HVAC systems and functioning air conditioning within your home and looking at, you know, where are you gonna be spending this money?

Is it going to be on your food that you're providing to your family?

Are you gonna be covering utility bills?

And those are decisions that are really hard to make for our families in this day and age.

And then I think we also look at, with those certain vocations and populations, they may have decreased health insurance and ability to go out and see healthcare providers that can deal with their comorbidities and also the effects of heat, to be able to see if a healthcare provider can recognize that and get them the attention and the care that they need to be able to make it if they find themselves in those type of situations.

- These are some big challenges that many families are facing.

Talk to me a little bit about how you went about preparing for the extreme heat, particularly in these communities.

Because I know you had a preparedness plan in place that you presented to the governor in March, not knowing that we were gonna break so many records this summer, right?

- Definitely.

We worked with the Governor's Office of Resiliency and their director and the governor issued her first Arizona Extreme Heat preparedness plan in March of this year.

And that really gave us a roadmap of how we were gonna be looking at extreme heat.

Our preparation and efforts across the state.

So we really focused in on what can we do to help prepare our communities for extreme heat?

How can we deal with any issues that are coming up around extreme heat?

What can we do to prepare on certain topics such as shelter, looking at health, disaster response, cooling center networks, also looking at what can be done around workforces and making sure that we have data for good decision making.

So we took that plan and really started running with it in March and getting areas, individuals, connected and prepared for what we're gonna be seeing in heat season.

I think when we think about heat season, it's commonly thought of from May to September, - [Catherine] Right.

- We know Arizona is its own animal and we saw that this year compared to 2023, like you mentioned with some of the staggering experiences we had.

We had our first triple digit day in late April.

We had our first heat advisory two to three weeks earlier than we had in 2023.

And that was the heat season labeled unprecedented.

- [Catherine] Right - Across the nation that we experienced within our state.

And it extended past our normal September timeframe.

It went all the way to mid, even into the third week of October seeing triple digits and impacts from the heat.

So we really got together and what can we do to get individuals prepared, get the message out so that we can make sure that individuals know what to do in the extreme heat.

How to protect themselves.

How to recognize the signs and symptoms of heat related illness and what is out there to help support them during the season.

And then rather than waiting for being in the middle of the heat season to connect partners and stakeholders, we started doing that before heat season even started.

So everybody knew who were the players at the table, who could you go to?

What was the process in case any needs came up or you needed resources?

How could you make that request and get that looked at and dealt with in a timely manner within your areas of the community?

And so that was really the way that we started heat season, to do as much as we can in preparation, and preparedness, to get everybody ready to go for what we were expecting in May.

- Before we talk about the resources that are out there for community members, talk to me a little bit about how you had to sort of shift things when all of these records were being broken.

Because, for example, you had these cooling stations for members of the community, but then you had to extend the period of time when they would be available when, you know, we're bumping up to Halloween and it's still, you know, almost a hundred degrees.

- Definitely.

One of the things about heat season is that you have to be flexible and it's a little bit different than some of the environmental hazards that we deal with, such as a flood or a hurricane.

We know heat season's going to happen.

We know when it's going to about start and we know when it's about going to end.

So you have that predicted scenario in front of you.

And so dealing with heat season, you do have to be flexible.

And one of the things that we did was just make sure that we were staying in contact with all of our partners across the state.

So one of the things that we have are six state heat work groups that we have ongoing in and outside of heat season.

And we have over a hundred community members from different facets across the state that have a interest in heat, engaged in those groups, so that we can hear what's going on.

What are the needs and how we can help communities move forward during heat season.

And so those were kept steady throughout heat season so we could hear from everyone and make sure we were getting resources available and be able to be reactive to any needs that were going on.

And then we've had efforts going on within our state for over two decades.

There has been amazing community engagement, amazing passion happening around heat and helping support communities across the stage.

So what we wanted to do is not reinvent the wheel, but what could we do to help share best practices that were happening, get it to others who may be able to benefit that.

Maybe tweak approaches so that we can get things going better if they needed a little bit of tweaking and what could we do to listen to folks and get information out to them.

And so that was really something that we did.

And those passionate members such as the city of Phoenix, our counties, public health entities, when we saw that heat season was extending past the end of September, really came together in those areas that were gonna continue and be impacted.

Extended cooling center hours.

And that infrastructure went for another two or three weeks, even though no one was expecting that to happen.

- [Catherine] Right.

- And even the state at the Capitol Mall locations, we had two cooling centers, mobile cooling centers that were implemented and we too went through October 15th to help those vulnerable populations get past that hump of that extended heat season.

- Well, when we talk about how this is a challenge for many of our Latino communities, can we talk specifically about children, and you know, what kind of an impact this has on the children when they're exposed to this kind of heat for so long?

How does it impact them physically and emotionally?

- It has a lot of impacts on children.

When we think about what heat can do, it can really affect an individual's mental health and their cognitive ability.

And we know children need to be engaged, be in school, be learning, be in safe environments, so that they can grow and flourish within our state.

And what you see with extreme heat is that it can impair their learning capacity.

We see that heat diminishes mental retention and cognitive and reaction abilities.

And there's research out there that shows that for every one degree, past 90 degree temperatures that you have an increase, you have a decrease of 1% on standardized testing.

- [Catherine] Wow.

- So that is huge, especially thinking about some of the temperatures that we're experiencing in our state and what children may be going through.

But not only that.

We have to think about the physiology of a child.

Their bodies are different than adults and so they don't have the same ability to recognize thirst or signs of dehydration.

They're also have different body masses.

So they are more sensitive to environmental heat than adults are.

And they're dependent on adults to help guide them appropriately to see if they can recognize a site of symptoms of heat related illness.

And also when it comes to hydration and breaks, to make sure that they're getting those appropriately.

And so we as adults need to help them get through the heat season and make sure that they're thinking about that appropriately.

And outside of that, if we think about just trying to go through from day-to-day.

Sleep can be impacted and you know how hard it is to have a good day start if you don't have a good night's sleep.

And so heat can diminish the hours of sleep that you get and can lead to a lot of additional mental health impacts.

And you can see that with, has been shown within research in other areas.

You can have increased irritability, you can have increased aggression happen with extreme heat.

You can also see increased rates in suicide during extreme heat.

And then you also see an increase in negative moods that happen with extreme heat.

So you have a decrease in those positive mood sets.

You have more depression related social media posts that happen during extreme heat, and then that can put an individual at risk on that end too.

- So these are serious implications from extreme heat, particularly on our children, which makes the outreach effort that much more important, especially reaching, like you said, the parents, the adults, the caretakers in the family.

So can you tell me, are there specific outreach efforts for the Latino community that are bilingual?

Are you doing any increased awareness campaigns, especially looking ahead to next year where we might see much of the same kind of extreme heat?

- Definitely.

I think we hit the ground running this year, but we have some different areas that we really want to focus in for 2025 and children are one of those.

And I think when we look at what we can do, and one of the primary state working groups that we have was really focused on communication.

How can we have multimodal, multilingual approaches when it comes to messaging, resources, and other items that can help community members, that they can actually be applied, digested and useful to community members going forward.

And so we do have those multilingual resources available and make those available to our partners and stakeholders.

We also made sure that we had engagement for the recruitment of our state heat working groups.

We wanted to make sure that we had a good equitable approach to recruitment, making sure that we had different voices engaged from across the state and make sure that they have a place to bring their needs and their wants and a place that they can be listened to and that we can go ahead and those different areas within those state heat work groups be able to accommodate those needs that happen across communities and Latinos definitely being one of those.

I think also we try to go out to the community as much as we can.

We try to be transparent about the approaches that we're having as a state, our partnerships, and that it takes a village approach to get through each heat season.

And we do things like the Ecomadres and other events that happen to let people know what are we doing, how can we get engaged with them, and how can we make sure that their needs are being attended to and let them know that we're not this nebulous entity kind of just working on in the stratosphere.

We really want to know what's needed and how we can help them move forward in anything that comes up during heat season.

- So for the folks who are watching, there is a website that they can go to where you have several resources that people can find information, not just on, you know, how to prepare for the extreme heat, but what symptoms to look out for if there are indeed heat related illnesses that, you know, they're dealing with.

- Definitely.

We do have a website at azhealth.gov/heat, that you can go to and that can be translated into Spanish, so you can get all that information in English or Spanish or other languages also.

There's a translation button that's available to it.

And we have resources there to make sure that you can have the awareness of what to expect during heat season, how you can stay safe during heat season.

And there's also toolkits out there for outdoor workers, school, older adults, and other communities that may need a little extra guidance to make sure that they're doing everything they can to come out on the positive in the heat season.

- Well, I appreciate you joining me to talk about this because before we know it, heat season will be here again.

- Yes, it will.

- So doctor, thank you so much.

It's always good to see you.

- Thank you so much for the opportunity.

- Thank you.

And that's our show for tonight.

For Horizonte and Arizona PBS, I'm Catherine Anaya.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Have a great night.

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