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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced $5 million in grant funding Monday for California institutions researching the impacts of climate change on underserved communities, including $1.35 million awarded to Stanford University.
The grant Stanford received will fund a research project on sanitation infrastructure and climate change in African American communities.
William Abraham Tarpeh, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, is the principal investigator for the project.
“Although access to sanitation infrastructure in the U.S. is widespread, it is still not equitable, particularly for underserved African American communities,” the project team wrote in its research abstract posted on the EPA’s website.
Researchers involved in Tarpeh’s project will examine sanitation-related environmental contaminants, comparing two Black-majority communities (one in an urban setting and another in a rural setting) and focusing on how climate change affects infrastructure. They said they intend to design improved sanitation infrastructure to help address the impacts of climate change in the communities where they’re researching.
Investing in this research is intended to help address the disparate impacts of climate change on marginalized communities, the EPA said in a press release announcing the grants.
“Some communities are more vulnerable because they already face greater exposure to pollutants and lack the resources to respond to and cope with environmental stressors,” the press release said. “These communities may be more likely to suffer sustained or even permanent damage from the impacts of climate change, further worsening health disparities.”
A total of four research institutions in California received EPA grants. In addition to Stanford, the University of California, Davis; University of California, San Francisco; and Physicians Scientists and Engineers for Sustainable and Healthy Energy were awarded research funding.
“These projects will advance solutions to challenges lying at the intersection of climate change and environmental justice, both here in California and in communities around the country,” EPA Pacific Southwest Regional Administrator Martha Guzman said in a press release. “Advancing scientific research that helps protect public health and the environment is central to EPA’s mission and these projects will have lasting results for years to come.”
