As recent severe weather events have made tragically clear, the effects of climate change pose widespread challenges to communities across the United States, but those negative effects are not evenly distributed. Due to a range of factors — including underlying health inequities and systemic disadvantages that make preventive planning difficult — American Indian and rural communities are at elevated risk of suffering from the impacts of climate change. And while a considerable amount of research has been conducted on climate change’s impact on urban and coastal communities, significantly less data is available on rural and American Indian populations, leaving planners and policymakers unable to adequately create effective climate policy for these communities.

A new research center housed in the University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) aims to directly address these challenges and research gaps. Called the Mni Sota Center for Climate Change and Health (M3CH), the center will focus on how climate-related factors—such as extreme weather, air pollution, droughts, and ecosystem changes—affect the health of people in the Upper Midwest, with an emphasis on how these changes are affecting American Indian tribes and rural populations. In addition to gathering data, the center will also seek to develop actionable strategies for climate adaptation and mitigation that are culturally respectful and grounded in community traditions.

The M3CH is one of 21 exploratory research centers founded as part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Climate Change and Health Initiative (CCHI). Each research center has a unique scope of activities designed to investigate various aspects of climate change and health. Though the scope of each center will vary, all will collaborate directly with local communities affected by climate change to develop their unique projects and research agendas.

Bruce Alexander, SPH professor, division head, and M3CH co-director, described the unique research approach called “two-eyed seeing” that will help guide the center’s work.

“Mni Sota is a Dakota word meaning ‘where the waters reflect the sky,’ and we chose it for the name of the center to emphasize our overall mission,” Alexander says. “The center’s work will adopt a ‘two-eyed seeing’ approach, which is a framework that integrates both Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK) and Western scientific perspectives. By partnering with Tribal communities and weaving together Indigenous ways of understanding ecosystems, culture, and spirituality with the research tools and methods of Western science, the Mni Sota Center for Climate Change and Health aims to develop more holistic and culturally responsive solutions for climate adaptation and mitigation.”

The work of the M3CH will be organized around four specific aims:

• Forming partnerships to help build regional research capacity to address the health impacts of climate change.
• Establishing a Community Engagement Core to co-develop a research agenda with American Indian and rural communities.
• Supporting research projects using health data from the Minnesota Electronic Health Records Consortium to study how extreme weather disproportionately affects people in at-risk communities.
• Developing a Pilot Project and Emerging Issues program that identifies and responds to key priorities of stakeholders.

“The Exploratory Research Center program is one of the most significant pillars of the NIH CCHI,” said NIEHS Director Rick Woychik, Ph.D. “The 21 research centers will serve as a catalyst for solutions-focused research into this complex and pressing global health challenge.”

Director of the Institute on the Environment and Distinguished McKnight University Professor Jessica Hellman is M3CH’s co-director. Housed in SPH, M3CH is a multidisciplinary team that includes researchers from across the UMN, including the Institute on the Environment, the Medical School, and SPH’s Upper Midwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center (UMASH). Researchers from the Minnesota Electronic Health Records Consortium are also part of M3CH.

The center’s Research Project Lead is SPH Associate Professor Jesse Berman, and the Community Engagement Co-leads are SPH Assistant Professor Kyle X. Hill and SPH Associate Professor Dana Carroll.