Climas cruzados: A comparative study of climate-related health risks, perception, and adaption in informal settlements across the Colombian climate gradient

Residents of informal settlements in Latin America face compounding climate-related health threats that are intensifying as temperatures rise globally. These communities—structurally marginalized and often excluded from formal infrastructure, healthcare access, and municipal services—bear disproportionate exposure to extreme heat, flooding, and storms while possessing the fewest resources to adapt. Extreme heat poses particularly severe risks, linked to cardiovascular stress, pregnancy complications, cognitive impairment, and excess mortality. In self-built housing common to informal settlements, indoor temperatures frequently exceed outdoor levels, creating dangerous conditions especially for vulnerable groups including children, elderly residents, and those with chronic illnesses. Yet most heat-health research focuses on high-income countries or isolated heatwave events, leaving critical knowledge gaps about sustained heat exposure in tropical climates where residents endure elevated temperatures for months at a time. In Colombia, approximately 23% of urban residents live in informal or inadequate housing, routinely falling outside public health surveillance systems and climate adaptation programs. These communities face not only chronic heat exposure but also intersecting vulnerabilities—unstable terrain, water scarcity, infrastructure failures, and flood risks—that compound health impacts in ways that remain poorly understood. Urban heat island effects can raise nighttime temperatures by 4-5°C in areas like São Paulo's favelas, while in Colombian cities spanning distinct climate zones, residents experience vastly different exposure patterns and adaptive pressures.

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This project will explore how residents of informal settlements in three climatically diverse Colombian cities—Bucaramanga, Barranquilla, and Bogotá—experience, perceive, and respond to climate-related health risks, with particular emphasis on extreme heat while also examining flooding, storms, housing vulnerability, and infrastructure challenges. By leveraging climatic and social variation across sites, the research will characterize climate-related exposures in each location; compare health perceptions, symptoms, and adaptive behaviors to assess whether communities facing chronic heat exposure versus more seasonal patterns report distinct impacts or coping strategies; pilot feasible, low-cost, community-informed mixed-methods data collection approaches including structured surveys, symptom assessments, qualitative interviews, and potential indoor temperature monitoring; and co-create locally tailored dissemination products—such as heat-health toolkits or risk awareness materials—to strengthen adaptive capacity and inform neighborhood-level planning.

Expected outcomes include a successfully piloted methodology tested across both sites, yielding robust household-level data on climate exposure experiences, self-reported health symptoms, and community-grounded adaptation strategies; feasibility assessment for integrating low-cost environmental monitoring with identification of ethical, logistical, and practical considerations for future expansion; refined data collection instruments and preliminary analysis reports; co-created community dissemination materials in accessible, actionable formats; at least one peer-reviewed manuscript advancing climate-health equity scholarship; and strengthened collaborative infrastructure between academic and community partners positioned to pursue multi-country research initiatives. By centering local knowledge and developing participatory tools, the project aims to inform more equitable public health interventions and climate adaptation strategies while establishing foundations for larger-scale studies across climate-vulnerable regions of Latin America and the Caribbean.