 Welcome. Yeah thank you for joining us on fairly short notice. I'm Tim Briglin, the chair of the House Energy and Technology Committee, and Jared I've been reading some of the information that the Department of Health have been putting out on climate change. Yes. We didn't invite you in here to specifically talk about a bill. Okay. As an aside, we have a bills report committee right now that deals with climate change in a big way and how our state government would be involved in mitigating both greenhouse gas emissions and also addressing kind of adaption resilience issues. Okay. And some of those would certainly be related to how climate change affects people's health. Okay. And I know the Department of Health has in recent years done a fair amount of work on that and appreciate you sharing some of that work with us today. Sure. Welcome. Thank you. Happy to be here. Good morning. Good morning. I'm Jared Ulmer, climate health program manager at the Department of Health. And I wasn't sure exactly how you wanted to proceed. I have about 15 minutes worth of slides that I can walk through that kind of give an overview of some of the material you were asking about if you want to do something more just conversational less fine too. Yeah. We try not to be rude but we often interrupt. It's to help set up the conversation so it's set up for interruption. There are a couple of documents that you have that are listed on our committee's website. Okay. And so this one is just so I've got the right one up. This is the presentation that I could run through. Okay. You should also have there's our climate change and health and Vermont report from 2017 which is kind of it's it's like a 20 page summary of all the work that we had done to date on exploring climate impacts on health in Vermont. So it's kind of the extended summary of a 150 page report that we produced earlier. Okay. So those are the two main things. I think the other thing was just a link to our climate and health website. Yeah. Well I can just start walking through this presentation but feel free to interrupt and and we can chat in more detail about any of these. I just want to kind of give you an overview of some of the different things that we work on through the climate health program and just as a way of introduction. We were established in 2012 through a grant from the Centers for Disease Control. There's 18 cities and states on the map behind me that show the the different places that have received our similar grant and are continuing to be funded. So we have this kind of network of collaborators across the country and a really nice cluster of them in the northeast that are working on similar issues to us that gives us folks that we can compare notes with and work together on some of our similar initiatives like in the northeast tick-borne diseases and cyanobacteria blooms for example. I'm going to go on to the next slide which is just we always start acknowledging that climate change is happening. This frames all of the work that we do that Vermont's getting warmer. Our warm season is lengthening our cold season shrinking and we've also been getting wetter over time particularly with heavy rain events. Though we do acknowledge that there have been drought events sprinkled in these kind of weather extremes or something that we're coming to expect more and more of having extended wet periods and extended dry periods but overall expecting it to get wetter here over time. I'm going to go ahead to the next slide to jump into the health effects. So the seven health effects that I have on the screen behind me are the ones that we identified through some of our early analysis as being the seven that are probably most relevant for Vermont that we try to raise awareness about and work on various strategies to address and I'm going to step through those in the subsequent slides. Yes one slide each so it'll be pretty pretty quick. Can you go back? Oh yes. Just one back one more. Oh yes. The seven inch increase in precipitation? Right. Roughly what's Vermont's annual precipitation? How much it increases? I think it's about forty I'm forgetting how forty two inches is where we're at or where we started but around the forty to fifty inch so. Fifteen percent or there about increase? Sounds about right. Yep. Okay. So I always start talking about heat illnesses this is one of the areas that we focus the most on because there wasn't much attention on hot weather and health impacts prior to this program starting. We in some of our early analysis explorers of Vermont specific data that made it clear to us that Vermonters are experiencing health effects from hot weather at temperatures that we don't maybe don't think of as being that hot like mid to upper 80s we start to see emergency room visits increase and even for older adults more deaths on days that start to reach the upper 80s and warmer so we've looked at how we expect temperatures to change over time in the recent past we only have about six days a year that reach 87 or warmer and some of our climate projections that we've received from working with folks at the University of Vermont show that we we can expect the number of days reaching the mid 80s or warmer to double or even triple by mid century and we may have as many as three to five weeks of days reaching 87 or warmer by the end of this entry and just for perspective 2018 which was a really abnormally hot summer for us we had about 18 or 19 days that would have met this threshold so our 2018 was we kind of like to think of as a preview of what will become a normal summer for Vermont in probably 30 years so I know you have this with lower emissions and higher emissions so what is the time frame I'm sorry oh no I see it yeah sorry I think across the bottom it's progressing it further into the future right so depending you know lots of factors depending on how quickly we warm those are sort of our high and low and estimates for those different time periods and sorry can you so what happy to circle back to that and I I actually have two slides on heat because I want to talk about our projections and some of what we experienced in 2018 during the six-day heat wave that we had from June 30th to July 5th we were at 93 degrees or warmer for six consecutive days which was one of the hottest and longest heat waves we've had on record in Vermont three of the days the heat index which also accounts for humidity we had three days that it felt like it was above 100 degrees and one of the things that doesn't show up here is we had really high nighttime low temperatures for a couple of days during the heat wave Burlington Airport recorded the all-time highest low temperature of 80 degrees which is kind of odd thing to say but the temperature never dropped below 80 degrees I think it was the morning of July 2nd night of July 1st and what we observed during that time was that our blue bars here showing people calling 9-1-1 for some kind of a heat related complaint the purples are people going to the emergency department for a heat related complaint and the small green bars are unfortunately for heat related deaths that were recorded during or immediately after that that heat wave and these are really kind of unprecedented numbers for us on a typical early July day we expect one to two emergency department visits for perspective and we were seeing more like you know 15 to 20 on several of these days we've also never seen more than two heat related deaths in a calendar year and about the previous 15 years of data that we looked at so having four in a one-week period is pretty alarming fortunately those are the only four of 2018 but still four is you know too many from from our perspective and a lot of these the people that were affected or older adults that don't have air conditioning and often live alone so a couple layers of challenges there for helping keep people in that situation safe and healthy is there a particular geography here or is this the state of Vermont it's the state of Vermont yeah and we have tried to break it down in smaller geographies and the data get really noisy once we do so so these are average temperatures for the state then or these are these were at the Burlington airport right yes so shifting to tick-borne diseases and we can kind of love mosquito-borne diseases and with some of these we we've all heard and experienced the impacts of increasing Lyme disease and my bar at the bottom of the slide is anoplasmosis which is a little more severe tick-borne disease that's also spread by the deer tick the same as that spreads Lyme disease so we know we've been seeing increases in tick-borne diseases in the state we think some of that is attributable to climate change but it's certainly not just a climate change issue there's a lot of forest fragmentation and and just other habitat issues with the deer tick really expanding from areas to the south of us expanding further north over time as it's kind of repopulated reforested areas where ticks likely were hundreds of years ago and then when we deforested everything they were largely wiped out and a lot of their their hosts like deer and mice were wiped out yes so this past summer I had a tick on me and it was probably there for more than 24 hours okay I had it extracted I went took it to the doctor and gave me some oxacypeline okay okay but they called up Department of Health okay and I said I said that in for evaluation of whether they have Lyme disease and they said we won't do that okay yeah so when we look at 2017 to 2018 goes from 1,093 down to 614 I'm wondering how you track that sure reports that did my doctor report it as a possible infection okay sure and I can I can speak a little bit about this this is a protocol that our infectious disease folks handle which is not something that I'm directly involved with but as far as I understand when a doctor diagnosis that you have contracted a tick-borne disease which there are several different might assess that they're actually required to report that case to the health department and they they get classified as probable or confirmed depending on the severity of the symptoms and the type of symptoms so that's what's being shown here are cases that were reported by physicians as being probable or confirmed cases to the health department so it's not tick bites that's correct that's correct right which we the health department does track tick bites as well if you just went to see a doctor because of a tick bite we track those but those don't necessarily link to tick-borne diseases for example right are they required to report any tip points they're not that's just something that we can pull out of what's called syndrome or surveillance data that gives us kind of almost real-time information about why people are going to the hospital it's kind of used to detect give early detection of infectious diseases or if there was bioterrorism or something like that but we can use it for a lot of other things like tracking tick bites so postulate that the number of actual incidents of tick bites much higher than 614 oh absolutely yes no you're you're absolutely right about that these are just the subset of people that were symptomatic enough to go to the doctor and have a diagnosed and even these we think this is under reporting actual cases of Lyme disease since some people into being asymptomatic or just their symptoms aren't bad enough to to seek treatment so I think these are still under reporting you pointed out the drop to 614 in 2018 which is interesting and we think this is climate related in the sense that 2018 was very hot and dry which is not good and not a good environment for a tick to be in ticks like warm and moist which is part of why we have the climate concern the more the warmer and moisture we are that's better tick habitat for survival and reproduction and survival of the hosts that they depend on but you you cross this threshold of you know to you can get to warm for a tick and you can definitely get to to dry for a tick and 2018 was a very dry and very hot year so that's part of why we would attribute that that drop in 2018 I'll take that as an asset do you have any any notion of data from 2019 yet or I don't you don't because my mind just anecdotal experience around my house was that 2019 I saw a lot fewer ticks and I think it was also quite dry okay yeah maybe that's the reason why right now that could be there were two two big reasons one is the climate change but another is also when we are restoring habitats yeah there's been sort of this natural you know repopulation of the whole northeast after you know we clear all the forest forests have started to come back and you know so I have the deer and lots of other critters so the the tick population was really kind of concentrated in southern New England when our forest cover was at its poorest hundred years ago kind of guessing but but ever since then the habitat has been much more conducive for a tick so there's been sort of this natural expansion from southern New England that climate change helps speed to some extent by by making places further further north suitable for ticks but I guess my point was some of that repopulation would have happened without climate change it's probably happening faster and to just a greater you know population extent because of climate change my other question is that you know I've had a hundred job to make around ticks and moose okay seeing you know some pretty and I think I reached out to paint just is that something that is increasing ticks impacts on ticks on the deer I believe so but that's not something that we we directly track I think I think actually ag is highly focused on yeah right there are different types of ticks that's right ticks that affect me moose herds not the kind of carry slang disease but other bad things can impact because of the number of bites sure right that's my understanding too can you speak to the geographic prevalence of ticks in Vermont my sense was that you know even as recent as two three four five years ago I live in kind of central Vermont and we've had plenty of ticks for years okay but that if I make this question for you mark but as you get close to the Canadian border you don't see them as much and I don't know if you track kind of the geographic movement of the prevalence of you know some of these infections and where they occur geographically yeah and if you're seeing more prevalence in the Northeast Kingdom or sure Orlean's you know Franklin County relative to you know they've probably been in Windsor and Wyndham County for years right we have very good data on where people live that have acquired a tick-borne disease and that data shows you know often that is where they acquired the disease that data shows that the southern parts of the state Bennington County has sort of been the hot spot for a number of years you see more of Lyme disease and anaplasmosis and all of these in the southern parts of the state but that has been shifting north words and I don't know enough about the details for central Vermont but it certainly there's been lots of tick-borne disease prevalent in central Vermont for years it's it's still fairly rare that we see it in the northeast there have been cases of tick-borne diseases in the northeast and like I said we can't without a lot of investigation we can't determine if they actually picked up that tick in the northeast or maybe they were down in Minnington and then went back up so we there's some limitations to how we can interpret that data but we definitely see this gradient of more disease in the south and in west and kind of less as you move north and east is that still probably from the severity of our winters the difference I think it's a little bit these might be related but a little bit to do with the the climate and winter severity is a little tricky because ticks don't really mind being cold they kind of go dormant as long as there's usually as long as there's some snowpack which is a year that it'll be interesting to see how things go next year and only have snowpack they can basically go dormant underneath the snowpack nestle down in some you know mulch litter and they're fine we've talked to researchers that collect ticks put them in a freezer for later you know extraction or whatever they do take take them out you know months later put them on the counter and they start walking around so unfortunately where we've learned that cold really doesn't kill ticks but cold has a big impact on it has more of an impact probably on the deer the rodents the other animals that ticks depend on so if deer have a really bad winter that can affect the ticks the bad winter won't really affect the ticks directly though but I was also mentioning how the tick populations kind of radiated out from southern New England so I think some of it is just sort of that natural expansion from the south is hitting the south part of the state first about mosquitoes mosquitoes have not been much of an issue we haven't seen much mosquito borne disease the thing that was interesting this past year is that the agency of ag looks for the Asian tiger mosquito which is theoretically a Zika carrier but it's not the primary mosquito that carries Zika and can also carry other diseases like dinghy and chikungunya more tropical diseases so they found for the first time in Vermont one of these Asian tiger mosquitoes in southern Vermont a couple months ago whether they can actually reproduce and live in Vermont is kind of questionable it's still a really poor climate for them it could be that it was in a tire in the back of somebody's truck that drove up from the south and you know tourists exactly could be a tourist I mean that it actually is sort of the expectation for the short term is that any mosquitoes that could carry those tropical diseases a are really in mosquito terms are really bad at transmitting those diseases and be are going to be tourists they're not going to be here for much of the year so expect the risks from those diseases to still be relatively low that could change over time so it's something that you know we're all we're all tracking from the mosquitoes that are here now we occasionally see some diseases like eastern equine cephalitis or West Nile but those are still relatively rare and rare enough that I couldn't say there's any kind of trend of up or down the fact that you found one when the tropical mosquito probably indicated there's a lot more because right no I suspect you're right and you know from us it was it it seemed interesting as a as a climate change indicator we weren't feeling super concerned about the health impacts at least in the near term but that's my my expectation to is that there's more out there and the more climate changes the longer this tourists are going to hang around so something yeah we definitely want to keep tracking I guess the one other dynamic here that I didn't mention was that with our longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons it just gives more days of the year that ticks can be active and that we're likely active outside with them depending on the research you'll see that ticks are active above the anywhere from like 30 to 40 degrees if there isn't snow cover they can be out and active so we do get reported cases of disease in December and January when we get thoughts and ground clear so the more you know the more days that we have that meet those characteristics above 30 no snow cover there's just more days that we're putting ourselves at risk with with ticks move on to extreme weather events which of course tropical starts from Irene is the first one that we always end up talking about but we've seen even with some of the the less impactful events that declare a few more declared disasters and the cost of those disasters has been going up over time there's certainly lots of great work being done to try to make us better prepared for for those flooding events and other storm events one of the things that we like to call attention to are some of the lingering impacts from from those events and again most of this was very pronounced around tropical storm Irene but there were a lot of impacts to water systems to food to food that people grow to food and people's homes because they lost power lots of at least anecdotes it's hard to get good data on this but lots of anecdotes about respiratory impacts that people experience during the cleanup of their homes or from going back to their flooded homes afterwards and from post-traumatic stress disorder following that event so there's lots of sort of ongoing health impacts that we wanted to keep awareness high about that you know once the event's gone and that immediate cleanup is gone there's there's still these lingering health impacts that we're concerned about fuel tank dislodge during the flooding related to that we've we've looked at some data some just drinking water data and recreational water data to see that it doesn't take flooding to to experience water quality impacts the the bars here there's a lot of data here but basically the darker the the bars those are representing heavier rain events and on the left we're we don't see much impact this is a E. coli detection so an indicator of bacteria in drinking water we don't see many of those in public drinking water period but we see more somewhat more when there's heavier rains and private wells that's somewhat common to detect E. coli at least 3% even under dry conditions and we see those numbers increase more and more following heavy rains and then in recreational waters we also see increases in E. coli at places that test the water for for swimming some of the beaches on like Champlain or state parks for example so the heavier rains are what washing and runoff carrying all kinds of you know whatever it may be that's that's leading to this water contamination so our expectation of having more heavy rain events in the future leads us concerned about more water contamination in the future so when there are heavy rain events usually what we hear about or combined subject overflow sure how closely do those correlate to this or is it a larger problem of general runoff yeah it's a great question this is just representing general runoff I would speculate this combined sewer over flow events certainly can contribute especially with the recreational waters since we do have some especially the ones you know along like Champlain that there some of the combined sewer overflows do dump out relatively near those so that's probably a contributing factor here but this is representing a much more widespread issue that combined sewer overflows probably aren't the dominant factor here and related to those cyanobacteria blooms are certainly an issue that we've been struggling with for for years with the main climate factor here being the lake has gotten a lot warmer over time some of the data that we've seen shows that depending on where you take the measurement the lake is warmed by 2 to 6 degrees over the last 50 years and cyanobacteria loves lots of nutrients and warm and calm waters so that's that's certainly contributing to the likelihood of cyanobacteria blooms and the runoff presumably it's also contributing to the cyanobacteria yeah we speculated is but we under as far as I understand there's such excessive nutrients in the lake already that it's it's hard for us to kind of disentangle the impact of new nutrient runoff from from any one event we tried to look into that in our data some so yes I mean the more we add it's not helping the problem but there's so there's so much nutrient in the water already that I think even if we cut off all those nutrient taps today we'd still be struggling with this for a while and the warming the warm water makes that more challenging calm water would bubblers for like waterfront properties have a meaningful impact or would it have to basically be everybody along the stretch like for town beaches yeah unfortunately way outside my knowledge I have seen some trials of some different systems like that to aerate and and some other kind of small-scale interventions I mean I think I think some of those have been demonstrated to have some impact in a small area but it's kind of like some of the tick interventions you may be able to address it in a small area but it would take such a huge resource investment to to apply some of those technologies at a large scale couple years ago on the UVM legislative summits there was a presentation by one of the professors or researchers on use of iron particles to okay to capture the phosphorus okay and precipitated out okay and I'm wondering if there has been any consideration of using technology like that yeah yeah I'm not sure that would be an entire thing but we collaborate with them on all the cyanobacteria work that we do and I can certainly check in and try to follow up with the committee I think this is my last impact slide just related to some air quality issues the slide I'm showing is about pollen and allergens where we've seen research from the Midwest that demonstrates that ragweed season has gotten longer in the northern the further north you go in the Midwest the longer ragweed season has gotten partially due we think to lengthening of the growing season but also due to more carbon dioxide in the air which essentially serves as fertilizer for for a lot of plants so we don't have any nice data like this for for Vermont or the East Coast but it's something that we track pollen data through one of the local allergy clinics and also track a couple of other air quality metrics ozone is something we were concerned about during hot weather events during the heatway we were talking about there were a couple days with high ozone levels too and that can really exacerbate some of the cardiovascular or respiratory conditions some of the wildfires out west have actually affected us to a low level with wildfire so we're still not expecting a whole lot of change in wildfire in Vermont especially if we get wetter but we're are kind of concerned about wildfire smoke from places upwind of us and what impacts that those can have here just one slide to to acknowledge that we're all affected by these these climate impacts on health but there's certain population groups that we tend to focus more on with our strategies and our outreach people that we think are probably disproportionately affected by these impacts and I've listed three categories here and I can give some examples but people who are exposed to climate effects so with the the heat illness example outdoor workers tend to experience higher rates of heat illnesses but also as I mentioned during the heatwave older adults that that don't have air conditioning for example in their homes or anybody that doesn't have air conditioning in their home is going to be more exposed to the impact of that heat event people with pre-existing health vulnerabilities I mentioned older adults tend to be more susceptible to impacts of heat for for biological reasons as our children but then up even other other people that don't fit in those age categories if you have a heart condition or a lung condition diabetes there's several conditions or medications that you could be taking that can make you more vulnerable to impacts from heat and people with limited adaptation resources so if you don't have the social network or the transportation local cooling center whatever it may be to help help you stay safe that's going to put you at higher risk so we kind of focus on where especially where these risk factors overlap and try to direct our our strategies there so as I was mentioning older adults being highly vulnerable at home without air conditioning especially those living alone so that's something that we try to work with partners on how do we address the heat conditions in the home or help provide safety checks or you know what can we do to help reduce risks for that really particularly vulnerable population and the last thing that I wanted to mention and I have one example to follow this is we like to talk about how I mean we do a lot of work on addressing climate impacts on health but we also want to talk about the potential health benefits of taking action to address climate change to today and we know that related to transportation strategies and housing strategies and other strategies a lot of those strategies can also provide health benefits and address some of the health concerns in Vermont I'm going to give a transportation example in just a second but I wanted also mention that we we try to work a lot with the state weatherization program and raising awareness about not just the sort of thermal hot cold benefits of weatherizing homes but there's often also improvements to ventilation that come with those weatherization services that improve indoor air quality you reduce moisture and mold there's a lot of research that shows that having a more energy efficient home it makes it cheaper but that also leads to reduce stress and more more money that can be spent on other things including healthier foods or paying your doctor bills or whatever it may be so they're sort of these indirect health benefits related to weatherizing homes and there's a couple of neat pilot projects going on not just with the health department but with some other folks as well that are trying to package weatherization and health services targeted to people that have chronic asthma or CPD or at a high risk for falling or injury in their home or different things like that I wanted to mention a transportation analysis that we just recently finished we just we did a hypothetical of if we met the comprehensive energy plan transportation goals by 2050 what kind of health impacts could we expect and we came up with some pretty big numbers using something called the integrated transport and health impacts model which is a model developed by some researchers in England and then applied in a couple places in the US that look at how travel behaviors and transportation technologies how changing those relate to changes in physical activity safety and air quality we found that meeting those comprehensive energy plan goals could save 2,000 lives by 2050 and save 1.1 billion dollars in terms of reduced healthcare costs and increased productivity while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions from passenger vehicles by 38 percent so we thought these are pretty big exciting numbers we dove into them in a little more detail to look at where those health benefits came from and what was really striking was how much of that health benefit was coming from walking and biking the gray bars up there are showing some of the air quality benefits from if we just electrified vehicles and I know that's a big just that's a big goal to meet but if we just electrified vehicles there would be some health benefits and 50 lives saved is fantastic and saving 10 million dollars is great but compared to some of the other strategies in the conference of energy plan the the big challenge for us is getting people more physically active and reducing our burden of product disease in the state so meeting some of those other other goals that get people more physically active and up saving far more lives and money than just electrifying and again I don't mean to be a little just electrifying because it's a huge goal and it's incredibly important for for meeting our climate goals but we want to call attention to there's a lot of health opportunity out there beyond vehicle electrification sure and I don't want to just in our limited time sure and the presentation materials you brought that much we can tease this apart but I'm really interested in this slide but I know there are different opportunities for people who you know want to walk to work or want to bite to work who might live in a more suburban area sure number month relative to a couple of the towns that I represent are very rural right and and frankly have an older population right my hobby is easy for sure a 75 year old to hop on a bike to ride to the grocery store absolutely so just trying to tease apart a little bit where the obvious opportunities are okay relative to certainly as you pointed out we want to get people into more fuel efficient or electrified vehicles and that's critically important right but some promoters are going to have more challenges and you know kind of accomplishing some of these things than other folks whether she was an age or because of geography yeah and so I'm just kind of interested in teasing apart it's just kind of low hanging fruit you know as it's our kind of towns and our you know more suburban areas or right are we anticipating that you know this type of transition and work as easily for you know people in Glover as in downtown bank right no it's a great question and very real challenges I think one of one of the points that we want to make with this is that there is clearly no one-size-fits-all solution for everybody and there may be communities that the walking and biking and transit strategies are clearly a better fit for and can be done more effectively at lower cost and I think focusing on the low hanging fruit first certainly makes sense whereas the electric vehicle strategies are gonna work well in other communities we also acknowledge that there's about 17,000 households in Vermont that don't have access to a vehicle so trying to think about what strategies can we work on to help improve access for for those folks affordability being a big challenge too with with relying on a vehicle I think the data I've seen shows it's something like 25% of income in Vermont on average is spent on on transportation so addressing the affordability pieces is obviously big too but we you know we try to we try to work with our local health offices on a lot of local policies that help either get more walking and biking facilities in place or focus on land use planning to to get more of the focus development we need to provide more low hanging fruit for for walking and biking I know some of those are really long-term long-term challenges but things that we're focusing on we also like to think about you know even in those suburban or rural areas often you're traveling to a place that you work in in Montpellier you work in Burlington where there's a lot of opportunity to do you know maybe not you might not commute to work on foot or by bus anytime soon but there's a lot of other opportunity to walk or bike or use local bus service to get to shops and services so you know how to think beyond just commuting and think about the other 80% of the trips we make are not are not commuting so how do we how do we take advantage of those and think about more focused activity centers where some of these other modes can be viable yeah I mean just as an example of that my hometown of Thetford has really expanded its parking right years and a lot of folks in my town tend to commute towards kind of Hanover way river function sure yeah and you know so the last five years the town from an energy standpoint has made it easier for people to have a safe place to park where there is schedule bus service that takes people up and takes them into that location every day so that was pretty straightforward and interestingly not related to energy but more health we set up in town a place for people to park their car not to commute with other people but a nice level place near the river for people to park their car and ride their bike to work oh nice okay you know there's probably ten cars in that parking lot every day okay people put their bike on the rack they grab over four hills to get there okay and work but frankly it wasn't energy related it was okay you know yeah so thank you for this presentation I thought it was really helpful some excellent demonstrations of the effects that we're seeing are what I'm wondering about is for instance with ticks walking biking is not protecting the monitors okay so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more what your agency what your department is doing right now to help the monitors deal with the effects of climate change to cope with those sure and I'd like to know if those are increasing strategies and programs static okay how they're evaluated sure determine whether or not they're adequate or okay great question it really depends by topic I'll just give a couple of examples hot weather preparedness is the area that I would say we've been focusing most of our energy on the last couple of years a lot of that to do with they're not being another clear leader on that topic right now in the state so that's sort of the gap that we've chosen to fill and some of them give you some examples of some of the things that we're working on one is we don't have a dedicated emergency response plan for a hot weather event so we're working on developing that that now in the unfortunate increasing likelihood that we do have you know multi-day hundred plus heat event that is going to require more resources than we would typically have available to throw at something like that having emergency plan in place is great but it really depends on a lot of the the strategies within that and that we work on in between emergencies so as I mentioned with older adults and some of their vulnerabilities we've been having conversations about how do we how do we support let me start by saying community cooling centers are great a great asset for some people if you can get to a place to stay cool if your home is has gotten untollerly warm but that doesn't work for everybody so we want to have a system where people in an emergency or preferably in advance of the murder in emergency can have a cooling system in place we have great structures in place in Vermont already for providing assistance with heating in the winters but no parallel for the summer we're trying to figure out how a program like that could could be operated and funded is something that we've been having conversations about so not to be argumentation really to try and understand the scale of work that's going on it means finding the right partners that could potentially implement a program like that actively actively yes yes we hope to have a draft ready to go by this spring so that we could maybe not adopt it but we could use it for action if needed this heat season that's our goal with a lot of these is having at least at least a draft or some kind of a process in place that is probably gonna need a lot of tweaking in revision but that will have some mechanisms because we know this has been an issue in the heatwave people call two and one say my house is hot I can't afford to cool it what can you do and they are amazingly creative and resourceful there and can come up with some ways to respond to a few of those but there's no systematic way of doing that so two on one is one of the our partners that we we're working with on this the folks they other folks in agency of human services that work more directly with older populations for example so these are very active conversations that we really hope and expect to see some some results from in the next couple months it is 211 currently operating 24 hours a day 365 I think they've gone back to that I'm not actually positive a related question and my information here is probably 30 years out of hate and whether it's you or somebody else in the room but in a former life when at the federal level there was lots of negotiation I like heat funding yes generally the northern states partnering with the southern states for very different reasons on how to support low income populations okay whether it was in the winter or whether it was helping people through kind of stressful heat times okay and lower income folks help with their conditioning okay to what extent do for monitors who are vulnerable whether for health issues or low income issues have access to like keep funding for air conditioning for electricity and certainly yeah we have that for heating right and fuel it's none right now okay there are some states that have some programs that support either purchasing units or subsidizing some electricity costs to run the units most of those are southern there are few northern state examples New York has a program but our program doesn't cover conditioning at all I was just going to say that I'm one of my former lives I was the weather position director in Burlington and I think it was late 90s that there was a hot spell in the Northeast and I don't know whether it was light heat to pay for it but for weatherization but there was an emergency air conditioning program that was implemented in August and I remember thinking that it was at the time you know these things take time but by the time it we actually got the air condition air conditioning installed it was September and it was not anymore but so I don't I don't think they ever did that again it doesn't seem like a really easy response to hot hot weather emergencies northerners are generally less able to relate to than we are cold if the we have a weather event where it's a week of 90 degree weather is there a comparable cold temperature that we could kind of relate it to to as far as the health risks to the population expected inspiring injuries etc would be like a week of 20 below yeah I think it's really hard to compare those the exposures are so different with for obviously there are people that are going to be very affected homeless people that aren't they're gonna be very affected during those cold temperatures most of us are gonna be okay because we're gonna run from heated place to heated place to heated place whereas that's not an option for a lot of remonters with the the hot temperatures so I think the the exposure is very different and the health impacts are pretty different I think the the best thing I can say is that our data shows that when when temperatures get to the mid to upper 80s we start seeing this this spike in emergency department visits so I mentioned that 87 degree number earlier which is a little arbitrary but if you look at days that reach 87 or warmer we see eight times as many emergency department visits as below 87 so that's what we've kind of keyed in on is that point and again 87 it's a little arbitrary so that's why I say mid to upper 80s that we start seeing clear health impacts in our data we haven't done a similar analysis like that on cold days to see if there's a really clear gradient there okay we're just great everything back cold as people keep their houses cool because they can't afford to heat them so it's a chronic issue rather than a acute issue that's a good point right there are people that run on a field sure well there's that you know there are conditions yeah something you didn't touch on and in the few minutes that we have left I want to make sure you there's good chance to comment on the health risks that you've noted on the earlier slide one thing you mentioned was mental health issues right and I suspect there are a lot of things to kind of pull apart there that's affecting kind of a mental health crisis yeah you know climate change actually being one of them right to what extent have you been narrow being able to narrow in on you know changes in you know whether whether events have had a right honestly about Vermonters we know almost nothing about the climate change connections to mental health there's just we've never found any good data out there to help us quantify or give us any kind of decent anecdotal data we know from national data that there's a couple of connections there that were concerned about one being just the kind of stress and anxiety about the issue of climate change is clearly having mental health issues nationally and globally certainly anybody affected by these different health issues there are mental health at least secondary impacts associated with with all of them that we have some some concerns about so we know that there are a couple of different pathways between climate change and mental health impacts that we have concerns about we just don't know much about how those are actually affecting Vermonters except for you know a few anecdotes we've had about again post-traumatic stress impacts after tropical storm Irene or some kind of one-offs like that that we've heard about but most of that's anecdotal and we don't really have any great data source for learning more about climate impacts on mental health in vermont right now great thank you for joining us this is really informative and helpful you're welcome happy to we might come back to you just to dig in on some of these other points particularly I mean you know as you were going through some of this presentation I was also looking through the longer report that you've given us and I recommend that other folks in the room to look at it a lot of really interesting more granular information there okay thank you thank you very much yeah okay just for committee members we are going to meet actually I'm gonna ask you Daniel for help we're gonna go through a few more bills after the floor let's say that floor is gonna be long today let's say that we will meet we're going to meet here 15 minutes after floor adjourns after we go through those bills we've got a couple of members joining us and so to be cognizant of their time from their committees if we could be here 15 minutes after the floor after that we have a report from efficiency vermont that they had done this summer again it's climate related about you know essentially energy insecurity and energy burden and after that and this is on me I would like to take a few minutes to go over the letter that I have now lost it's sent someplace in the computer that hopefully that won't take long but that we're gonna send to the appropriations committee on the testimony we took yesterday I think it'll be pretty straightforward but I don't want to send that without people having to work that so that's the rest of our day today thank you