POSTPONED—Divided D.C.: Heat Islands in Ward 7

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In Washington, D.C.’s swampy summertime, some neighborhoods register temperatures 10 to 20 degrees hotter than in leafy neighborhoods. As climate change exacerbates environmental hazards, low-income residents and communities of color are disproportionately exposed to pollution, extreme heat, and flooding. These communities are left to cope with heightened emotional stress and health strains from the climate crisis. 

Join Hola Cultura and the Pulitzer Center to discuss how environmental hazards in the nation's capital disproportionately affect low-income neighborhoods. Together, we’ll learn strategies to protect your mental and physical health and outline the infrastructural steps necessary to build a climate-resilient city. 

Hola Cultura’s podcast The Climate Divide explores how, in D.C. and nationwide, past and current policies augment these environmental injustices. In reporting supported by the Pulitzer Center, Hola Cultura’s team, with the help of youth interns, mapped temperature differences across the city, and tracked neighborhoods disproportionately prone to flooding, chronicling the impacts on the communities’ health. In the series' most recent season, reporters explore what crucial decisions need to be made now by the government to better prepare the District for extreme heat and floods, the two biggest climate threats in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia region.

Registration is required. 
 

Panelists:
 

• Christine MacDonald is an investigative reporter and the executive director of Hola Cultura, a nonprofit news site in Washington, D.C.
   
• Estelle-Marie Montgomery is the executive director of the FH Faunteroy Community Enrichment Center in D.C., where her work focuses on addressing systemic injustices by using an equity lens to improve social, economic, educational, health, and environmental outcomes through cross-generational programming.
   
• Dennis Chestnut is a lifetime resident of Ward 7 in Washington, D.C., and the retired founding executive director of Groundwork Anacostia River DC, a volunteer organization. He has a passion for conservation and the environment, and has advised many community, business, and government leaders on civic ecology and civic engagement issues.
   
• Marcelo Jauregui-Volpe is a journalist and video producer, and was the host of The Climate Divide.