2021 Environmental Scholar's Projects

Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates (BVHPCA), established in 1994, is a grassroots organization founded and led by long-term members of the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco. BVHPCA programs combine community organizing with education, advocacy, and direct services, and they take an active role in mobilizing the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood on issues of environmental and economic justice.

Her internship supported BVHPCA’s community outreach team and she worked with them to quantify its impact with COVID-19 vaccination and food insecurity outreach. She also supported the team's work to develop and implement strategies to learn about the community’s greatest concerns, which include housing, environmental health needs, and food insecurity. 

AC worked with Dr. Amy Padula to examine the association between wildfire smoke exposure and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Her research mainly focused on PM2.5 pollution as a predictor of newborn birth weight and gestational z-score. They examined over 6,000 births that occurred in 2018-2019 and tracked daily PM2.5 levels in San Francisco throughout each pregnancy. They then ran analysis models for different PM2.5 exposure categories and newborn birth weight, and also stratified exposures by levels of maternal privilege (i.e, education level, insurance type, race/ethnicity, etc.) to home in on disparities experienced by pregnant people of different backgrounds and varying levels of access to care. While these models are preliminary, they highlight the need for a more diverse study population to understand PM2.5’s effect on pregnancy outcomes as a function of privilege.

Read the blog AC wrote about this research project.

In 1937, an undetected natural gas leak caused an explosion at a school in New London, Texas, killing upwards of 300 middle and high school students. Since natural gas is naturally odorless and no odorants were added, the leak was never detected, and students and staff were unable to evacuate before the explosion occurred. In response to the explosion, a federal law was put into place ordering the odorization of natural gas as an explosion safety measure. However, the impact of the common natural gas odorants on health is understudied. The only current regulations that exist are for occupational exposures and do not apply to community exposure events. Given these data gaps, Olivia is conducting a systematic literature review on the most common natural gas odorants for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.

In addition to the systematic literature review, she has also been helping recruit participants for PSE Healthy Energy’s California Natural Gas Study. The basis of the study is to collect natural gas samples from stoves across California and analyze the samples to determine the constituents of natural gas besides methane, whether there is variability across the state, and whether any of the identified chemicals are harmful to human health. Specifically, Olivia is focusing on the Fresno and Bakersfield areas of California, which has been challenging to recruit because much of the population supports the use of natural gas.

California and federal legislature, alongside growing public momentum, have propelled the recent push towards a decreased reliance on coal, oil, and natural gas and an increased reliance on renewable energy sources and decarbonization of residential, commercial, and industrial facilities. In order to decarbonize buildings, we must electrify gas appliances in buildings and, ultimately, run those electric appliances off of renewable electric power. This switch is likely to bring both greenhouse gas and non-greenhouse gas benefits, such as improved indoor air quality through the reduction of in-home gas combustion.

It's is important to note, however, that low-income households, communities of color, renters, and other populations face barriers to adoption of these technologies, and so are less likely to see any of the benefits they bring. In addition, as fewer households remain reliant on gas infrastructure, a smaller number of households will be required to pay to maintain an aging gas infrastructure, causing their bills to increase. Given historic trends for the adoption of clean energy technologies, these households are more than likely to be low-income, populations of color, and renters, as identified above. One method to reduce this risk would be to retire entire sections of the gas distribution system at a time by electrifying entire communities, thereby reducing the cost of maintaining aging infrastructure.

This project aims to outline a strategy to identify which communities and sections of infrastructure to prioritize for retirement. The goal will be to create an index of prioritization metrics that reflect gas infrastructure attributes, population and pollution demographics, public health, natural disaster likelihood, and other priorities, in order to direct electrification investments.

Developed with Elena Krieger, PhD