Interviews provide insights for drought and public health roadmap

Rachel Lookadoo is a DWFI Faculty Fellow and the Director of Public Health Policy for the Water, Climate, and Health program at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Her research in public health and healthcare preparedness often leads to projects related to climate change and extreme climate events, how they impact the health of the community, and how best to prepare for those effects.

One such project is a collaborative report, titled Drought and Public Health: A Roadmap for Advancing Engagement and Preparedness, developed by Lookadoo and her UNMC colleagues Jesse Bell, who also serves as DWFI’s director of water, climate and health; Keith Hansen, director of the Center for Preparedness and Emergency Response Solutions; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).

The report was the first comprehensive assessment of drought and health in the country and the result of a national summit and five regional workshops on the topic of drought and health between 2019–2022, as well as one-on-one interviews with state health departments across the United States.

“One of the main outcomes of the workshops we held, as well as the interviews that I conducted, was an acknowledgment that there's a need for a better community of practice around drought and health,” said Lookadoo. “The report provides some guidance on how best to do that, but also sheds light on how many different stakeholders are involved in this issue, and should therefore be included in creating solutions.”

The authors have distributed the report — published in May 2023 — to attendees of their past workshops and the national summit, as well as throughout their own networks. So far, they have received positive feedback that practitioners find it a useful tool.

In her interviews, Lookadoo was surprised to find that there were a lot of trends in drought and health that are consistent across the country, no matter whether those interviewed were from a coastal state that rarely deals with drought or someone from the Southwest U.S. with drought as a constant threat. Generally, those interviewed expressed the same concerns related to drought.

One of those concerns was over unregulated private wells and the inability to easily and accurately measure water quality and quantity. Additionally, a number of state health department representatives mentioned the negative economic impacts of drought on their water-based tourism. Drought can impact the water levels or water quality in lakes used for recreation purposes.

Now that the report has been published, Lookadoo and her colleagues are working on another project with NOAA to create a public health communication tool around drought for health care providers. She sees this as a natural extension of the roadmap the team created in the report.

“The roadmap highlighted the problems, the concerns and the need for further action. This communication tool will provide actual concrete guidance on how to move forward with public health in the community, and how [practitioners] can best communicate about the health impacts of drought in their jurisdiction,” she said.

Funding for the roadmap was provided in part by DWFI. Lookadoo became a Faculty Fellow with the institute in 2022 and is part of the Water, Climate and Health Program, which brings together experts from UNMC, the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources (IANR) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and DWFI to address Nebraska’s most pressing public health issues related to water and climate.

“One of the things that has most impressed me about DWFI is the sheer scope and expanse of its work and its connections,” said Lookadoo. “Everyone has a voice in the conversation, and that's so critical for coming up with any functional solution to these problems. I really admire the work that DWFI does and I'm thrilled to get to be a part of that in some way,” said Lookadoo.