Session: Exploring Climate Change and Health and Wellbeing in Informal Settlements in Kenya (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

The environmental, social, and health consequences of climate change, which due to global structural inequities disproportionately affect low-income countries and more marginalized communities, profoundly affect human rights and social justice. As one of the Grand Challenges of Social Work, we recognize that extreme weather events (EWE), including increased temperature, excess precipitation, and drought, threaten human health and wellbeing and escalate existing social inequities, requiring a social work response. People living in poverty, women, and other individuals of non-dominant group status, are especially vulnerable to the harmful impacts of climate change. Approximately one billion people globally who live in informal settlements, defined as areas that lack durable housing, sufficient living and public spaces, access to basic infrastructure, and secure tenancy, are vulnerable to health risks across multiple dimensions, and yet we have little understanding of the impacts of EWEs on them and the ways in which residents, including women, mitigate and cope with these additional stressors.

This symposium will share findings from the Sauti Mashinani study, an NIMH-funded R21, which is grounded in community engaged participatory methods, including participatory action research (PAR), and Berry, Bowen, and Kjellstrom’s causal pathways framework for climate change and mental health. Abstracts reflect findings from six monthly surveys collected between September 2022 and March 2023 from a probability sample of 800 women participating in an 18 month longitudinal study investigating the effects of climate on the health and well being of women residents in two large informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya.

The first presentation compares meteorological data on EWE with survey responses from participants describing their experience of extreme weather in order to examine how thresholds used by climate scientists might miss significant impact and adverse consequences among residents, and the implications this has for adaptations and mitigation strategies. The second presentation looks through the lens of socio-ecological theory, and illuminates the multilevel impacts described by residents as a result of extreme weather, and discusses how these may inform adaptations at intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, community, and policy levels. The third presentation describes the individual level coping strategies reported by participants to survive and thrive in the face of these multilevel impacts and adverse consequences, similarly informing mitigation practices and policies to improve quality of life. The fourth presentation offers a description of the experience of sleep among residents, as sleep is among the top coping strategies and an essential component of health and wellbeing. Finally, we describe an assessment of how PAR may serve as a model of empowerment for research team members from informal settlements and as a tool for sustainable psychological, social, and economic empowerment to leverage stronger community capacity building, networks, and resources for this work.

Findings provide a window into one of the first longitudinal social work and climate change studies, and one that is deeply invested in community engagement and collaboration. They also inform proposed intervention components, adaptation and mitigation strategies for climate change impacts on wellbeing within this population, and among other, similar communities globally.