Diagnosing the youth mental health crisis? Don’t forget housing and extreme heat
The City of Boston recently announced a new $21 million initiative to address the urgent need for more mental health services and programs for youth and families. This announcement follows a report from the Boston Public Health Commission detailing how widespread persistent sadness and anxiety has become amongst youth and adults. And the problem is growing. Between 2015 and 2021, youth in Boston experiencing persistent sadness steadily increased from 26.7 percent to 43.9 percent.
Solving urban health problems from a global perspective
Boston has experienced more hot days and nights in the last ten years than ever before. And Boston University students are looking for solutions. In fall 2023, students in CAS SO490: “Politics of Global Health,” a MetroBridge course, investigated methods to mitigate climate issues like extreme heat, storm water, and coastal flooding in cities in the US and around the world in order to address the problem in Greater Boston.
Tampa Bay trees tamp down harsh climate change effects
Be-leaf it or not, trees are doing some of the hardest work in Tampa Bay. Driving the news: Hillsborough and Sarasota counties ranked high in Climate Central’s recent nationwide analysis of urban trees. Why it matters: Urban tree coverage helps reduce the impacts of extreme heat, prevents stormwater runoff, mitigates air pollution exposure and can even sequester carbon, Axios’ Ayurella Horn-Muller and Simran Parwani report.
Trees and soil at the forest’s edge store more carbon than we thought, studies reveal
‘We think about forests as big landscapes, but really they are chopped up into all these little segments because of the human world,” Hutyra said. In two separate studies, her research group investigated the differences in carbon storage of trees and soils along forest edges versus the interiors of temperate forests in the northeastern United States. Hutyra and her team found that trees on the edge of forest fragments grow faster than those deeper in the interior, and that soil on the edge of urban forests has a greater capacity to store carbon than previously known.
Urban Forests May be Storing More Carbon Dioxide Than They Emit
For more than a decade, Ecologist and biogeochemist Lucy Hutyra from Boston University has been studying how the planet’s “lungs” are affected when big forests are cut down into smaller areas, a phenomenon known as forest fragmentation.