Columbia Climate School's Office of Faculty Affairs is pleased to announce Sari Blakeley will deliver our next research seminar, “Too Hot to Handle: When Heat Stress Negatively Impacts Work Habits in Senegal,” on Wednesday, February 11, from 1:00pm - 2:30pm in the Hogan Hall A-level Conference Room, at 2910 Broadway.
If joining on Zoom, RSVP here. You will receive the Zoom link the day before the event. If you cannot access this link, please email [email protected] to be added to the Zoom list. Light refreshments will be served.
Abstract:
Farmers in West Africa must be strategic in how they spend their time on work, as the number of activities frequently exceeds the number of hours in a day. During the rainy season, there are agricultural and household production activities that must be done in order to grow enough food to survive and more generally to support their livelihoods. However, heat stress due to climate change is posed to increase, limiting the number of workable hours during the day. Our study focuses on how participants experience heat stress at three critical periods of the crop calendar- sowing, the height of the rainy season, and harvest. Through survey data and voice recordings, we measure how heat impacts the participants, and if they feel uncomfortable to the point of changing work habits. Additionally, we cross reference their experiences with remotely sensed temperature data as measured by CHIRTS. Although outside the scope of our study, we speculate that changes in work habits due to heat stress may have long term impacts on how work is divided between household members and the time of day that different activities are performed.
Bio:
Sarah (Sari) Lucille Blakeley is an Associate Research Scientist at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP). Her research is application-driven and focuses on understanding how global climate change impacts human and natural systems across multiple spatiotemporal scales, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, this research focuses on food security, gendered impacts of climate shocks, financial risk management to natural disasters, climate variability, and climate change. Blakeley received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Geography, her MA from Columbia University in Climate and Society, and her BS in Economics, Interdisciplinary Studies, and French from Michigan State University.
