Co-Design Climate Resilient Community Health and Climate Justice in Harrisburg, Pa.

This workshop will focus on co-designing resilient communities to enhance coping capacity with floods and heat, environmental health, and climate justice. This study emphasizes the importance of a co-design approach that meaningfully involves community members and a transdisciplinary team to co-produce knowledge and applied solutions.

The Harrisburg-to-Steelton corridor, along the banks of the Susquehanna River, were historically redlined communities since the 1930s and are identified as highly socially vulnerable and under-resourced today, especially when facing climate change-associated hazards such as extreme floods and heat. Consequently, the communities bear the inequitable burdens of environmental quality, disasters, health, and environmental injustice outcomes. This project is investigating the intersection of co-designing resilient communities to enhance coping capacity with floods and heat, environmental health, and climate justice. This study emphasizes the importance of a co-design approach that meaningfully involves community members and a transdisciplinary team to co-produce knowledge and applied solutions.

This research builds upon existing community relations that Penn State Harrisburg and University Park served to develop a Co-Design Research Framework. This framework aims to scale and adapt co-design methodologies to ensure research inquiries align with community needs, foster local knowledge, and produce actionable nature-based solutions. The co-design process is structured to embed community voices in shaping research questions, methodologies, and outcomes, thereby addressing equity and ensuring that strategies do not exacerbate existing disparities by integrating community health goals with resilience strategies.

This research advocates for sustainable living environments and an enhanced quality of life. The outcomes are reciprocal to the community and generate positive impacts. The Co-Design Research Framework critically examines how community-based research can be conducted to co-create knowledge and solutions amongst communities, stakeholders, scientists, engineers, and designers, to foster resilient, just, and healthy communities in the face of climate change.