News Releases

In this video, Carina Gronlund, Research Associate Professor in ISR’s Survey Research Center, discusses the impact of her research on the health benefits of weatherization programs.

“I study the separate and combined effects of air pollution, pollen, and severe weather, and who is most vulnerable to those,and what we can do to help people adapt to those through changes in behavior and changes in the living environment.

Understanding the health benefits of weatherization programs can help us make decisions about how expenditures on those programs can offset medical expenditures. So for example, if we see that weatherization helps to improve your sleep by improving your bedroom temperatures, for example, then we can further estimate how that reduces your risk of having to go to the emergency department or dying prematurely.

And so that’s what’s motivated a shift in my research towards understanding how weatherization, like insulating buildings and air sealing them, can help improve health. Right now those programs are primarily reducing people’s utility bills, but we think that there are probably also some major health benefits related to protecting people from outdoor extreme temperatures and air pollution.

It’s important to fund epidemiology and health risk assessments so that we can understand the magnitude of all of these exposures that we’re experiencing and use that information to help us figure out which programs to fund, how to spend that money, but fundamentally how to keep people out of the emergency room and how to prevent premature deaths.”